I look forward and see myself look back.
Why do analysts always answer a question with a question?
There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.
At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.
We all have fantasies about sex that are more perfect than anything in reality.
Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?
Sex doesn’t disappear, it just changes forms.
I think poetry is the best thing I do. It’s certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.
It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.
A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.
The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn’t mean you can’t exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
Surviving means being born over and over.
Most sex is not really intimate.
When you start having lunch and actually eating, it’s already over.
I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?
I knew I was in England by the smell.
Good sex is a mystery. Perhaps humping and pumping is not a mystery, but good sex is a mystery, and how human beings become truly intimate remains a mystery.