“It’s horrible getting older. I mean, it’s wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it’s horrible losing your looks.”

The sexuality doesn’t end. It really doesn’t. You’re sexual your whole life, if you’re a sexual person.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.

In a world where women work three times as hard for half as much, our achievement has been denigrated, both marriage and divorce have turned against us, our motherhood has been used as an obstacle to our success, our passion as a trap.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

If, every day, I dare to remember that I am here on loan, that this house, this hillside, these minutes are all leased to me, not given, I will never despair.

You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

Unhappiness is our element. We come to believe we can’t function without it.

If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it right you must have time to do it over. If you don’t know where you are going, how do you know when you get there? If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

The best slave does not need to be beaten. She beats herself.

There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it.

I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…

I think of art as coming from daily life, daily experience. I think it’s very important not to have it become work for some kind of elite circle.

The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.

Undervalued and downgraded in international circles, most of all by the United States.

Then shoulder to shoulder! Let us engirdle the little circle of the earth with the chains that bind us to each other.

We’re always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it’s caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.

Why does my mind circle around you? Why do planets wonder what it would be like to be you?