our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

If the very thought of taking off all your clothes in the middle of the Washington Mall during a school holiday makes you blush, you haven't even begun to dream what it feels like to publish a book.

I will write myself into well-being.

God enters the world through those of us who are willing to let God participate fully in our lives.

The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.

I don't think a name defines the core of who you are.

The films that I do tend to polarise people's views.

I like to see what future generations are thinking about.

If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

The spring's already at the gate With looks my care beguiling; The country round appeareth straight A flower-garden smiling.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

I bruise easily so be gentle when you handle me.

The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.

So, we pray well when we remain in this way in the presence of God, with no exertion of the understanding or will. Therefore, you will do well to listen to God in the urge you feel to return to us.