I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn’t have to choose. And I believe that’s always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.
Women are not the richer sex. Women are not equal in society.
Many, many people have done a lot more sexual experimentation than I have.
A baby’s mother also needs a mother.
You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.
Each day that I don’t write I get more fragmented.
I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it’s braver to die old.
When everyone thinks they know you, it’s hard not to be guarded.
It’s hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.
Feminism is teaching. I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I’ve met and worked with.
Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
What a damnably lonely profession writing is! In order to do it, one must banish the world, and having banished it, one feels cosmically alone.
A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.
We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.
As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn’t write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.
Having stopped expecting truth, we rarely get it.
My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.