“Art is always an energy exchange.”

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

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.

Because it appears to me a hazardous thing to exchange my soul for my shadow.

In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.

Sovereignty is not negotiated in exchange for anything; to maintain the achievements of the revolution does not depend on a foreign power.

The exchange of trust and the experience of understanding between two people was like a sign or witness to the possibilitity of eternal caring and understanding and communication.

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder

What really enthralls me is working with the actor and seeing where you can go with that. It’s in that exchange and that relationship.

To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.

For often evil men are rich, and good men poor; But we will not exchange with them Our virtue for their wealth since one abides always, While riches change their owners every day.