I had come to feel that my mother’s love for me was designed solely to make me into an echo of her; and I didn’t know why, but I felt that I would rather be dead than become just an echo of someone.
The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang.
I’ve never let the criticism deter me.
An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.
I write out of defiance.
My writing has always been met with derision or dismissal.
Habit gives endurance, and fatigue is the best night cap.
I’m sometimes afraid I’ll cross a line and it’ll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.
Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I’m just the same. I’m always disappointed that I’m just the same, but not enough to never do it again!
It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn’t disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.
When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I’m finished.
I’m trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.
I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.
I don’t really do anything that isn’t about writing, and I don’t really know who I am if I’m not thinking about writing.
Everything I do is because of writing. If I go for a walk, it’s because I’m thinking of writing. I go look at flowers, I go look at the garden, I go look at a museum, but it’s all coming back to writing.
When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself.
It is true that our skin is sort of more or less the same shade. But is it true that our skin color makes us a distinctive race? No.
What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.
If I describe a person’s physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is “black” or “white.” I may describe the color of their skin – black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I’m not talking about race.
Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say “Oh, she’s so angry.” If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes “Oh, she’s autobiographical.”