“I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn’t have to choose. And I believe that’s always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.”

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.

it used to be almost the first question (just after ‘Can you type?’) in the standard female job interview: ‘Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?

Motherhood: if it were going to be easy, it never would have started with something called labor.

Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.

War is to man what motherhood is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot.

When children are little, they really need you in one way. When they’re bigger, they need you as a friend.

Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.