“It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.”

The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

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.

Any man who doesn’t love his mama can’t be no friend of mine.

I want my fans to feel like we’re always in touch. Because without ’em, I wouldn’t be able to do any of this.

Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

If you become famous and don’t have a live show to back it up, they’re not going to pay you any money.

Any time someone achieves success before they’ve earned it, it always comes back to haunt them.

Richard Fliehr does not make any money.

Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme.

Any effects created before 1975 were done with either tape or echo chambers or some kind of acoustic treatment. No magic black boxes!