If we don’t bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.

I believe only in art and failure.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

If the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

The message of women’s liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

I’ve never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn’t sew, I could think.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.

If we don’t bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they’re married, then one always suspects they don’t.