“Those who build walls are their own prisoners.”

But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over.

Music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.

We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.

Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.

I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world.

There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.

To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars.

I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.

The only difference between being eccentric and being nuts is the number of security boxes you own.

Minding my own business, humming out a ‘Frere Jacques’ – and I realized that in any other town, this might be considered cute. But you know what it is in San Francisco? Sexy.

Russia has a strategy of creating the conditions that give rise to corruption, then exploiting that corruption to its own benefit.

The most brutal war, the greatest amount of casualties that America’s ever had.

At ‘SNL,’ I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in ’95, I could let my own beliefs out.

I worked the circus, carnival, I had my own medicine show, I worked 18 years of radio.

His statement was, “We’re going to the same place, except you’re taking a taxi, and I’m driving my own car.” That’s me and Ian MacKaye’s relationship. I love him, he’s great.

Married sex is like being awake during your own autopsy. It is root canal work without anesthetic.