“The moment I look at you, then for me to make any sound won't work. My tongue is broken, and at once a delicate fire rushes beneath my skin. With my eyes I see nothing, and my ears make a roar. Sweat pours down me, and a trembling seizes me all over.”

"We must have ideals and try to live up to them, even if we never quite succeed. Life would be a sorry business without them. With them it's grand and great."

“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all my femaleness. Because I deserve to be.”

“I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.”

“Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.”

“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”

“I hate to hear you talking so, like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth waters all our days.”

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?”

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”

“Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the highly complex and satisfying process of creation.”

“I’m sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn’t make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.”

“Thank goodness, my education was neglected; I was never sent to school...it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”

“It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent—like a carrier-pigeon.”

“There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.”

“What is important is not the lucky break, the stopping of the train—that’s only part of it. Life is full of trains that stop. What counts is what we are doing with our lives when there is no opportunity and not a train in sight.”

“Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.”

“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.”

“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”

"Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself 'Why?' afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded."

"I am a person who thinks about the nature of the spirit when I write. I think about what can't be known and only imagined. I often sense a spirit or force or meaning beyond myself. I leave it open as to what the spirit is, but I continue to make guesses."

"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page."

“The beginning is always today.”