Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.

All men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.