“Loving someone is a loss of freedom – but one doesn’t think of it as loss because one gains so much else.”

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.

It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

I don’t know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else’s erotica that you don’t like.

Don’t ye know that ev’ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

When you wake up and act like a loving person, you realize not only that you are altered, but that the people around you are also transformed, because everybody is changed by the reception of this love.

The true measure of loving God is to love him without measure.

Loving someone condemns you to a lifetime of fear. You become painfully conscious of how fragile people are – bundles of brittle bones and vulnerable flesh, breeding grounds for billions of deadly germs and horrible diseases.

All the children stood and gazed at it, loving it and longing to go to it. It looked so secret – almost magic.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.

Mature love is loving, not being loved.

Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do can love things that no one else can love. We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music.

You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back. The heart will break… but broken live on.