“Because I'm moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there's not enough female irrepressibility written down. I've fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender's silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

“Because the world itself is now unfathomable, the only complexities that really count are small moments of domestic life that combine to trigger deep emotion. There is no longer any way of being poor in any interesting way in major cities like Manhattan”

“Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong?”

“There's not enough coffee in the world to fuel all the books I want to write”

“Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk with self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.”

“Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.”

“We're slammed at work and busy at home. Throw in an occasional outing with friends or significant others, and we're ready for bed at 10:00 PM every night. Really ready for bed. There's barely enough time in a day to cover all our mandatory obligations, so optional activities like novel writing, journaling, painting or playing music--things that feel great but no one will ever take us to task for shirking--are invariably left for another day.Which is how most of us become 'one day' novelists. As in, 'One day, I'd really like to write a novel.' The problem is that that day never seems to come, and so we're stuck.”