Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.
The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.
We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.
Besides, when you say you’re a feminist it annoys the bigots and the old farts and the prissy ladies so much, it’s kind of irresistible.
Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.
All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.
As a writer, you are free.
The reader can’t take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.
Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.
In art, ‘good enough’ is not good enough.
Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don’t like either hobbits, or quasars; they don’t feel at home with them; they don’t want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I’ll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one.
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.
If your voice is heard by more people because you’ve earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It’s only a secret to people who don’t want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Dreams take short cuts.
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.