"Any number of definitions help to determine who we are. It doesn't hurt to be a woman writer, an American woman writer, American woman writer of the 21st century. I think all these descriptions of us — and they're descriptions and adjectives that pertain to you — none of them diminish you, really. I think that maybe there's a kind of deepening or expansion the more identifications you have."

"The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me."

"It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students."

"Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates."

"There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so."

"At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it."

"We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances. The writing self is likely to be a highly private, conjured sort of being — you would not find it in a grocery store."

"If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write “teacher.” I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. [Pause.] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes — or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage."

"Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort — these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work."

"The writer is a “somewhat mystical” — or do I mean “mythical”? — person."

"Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don’t give up, don’t be discouraged, don’t pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this."

"My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can’t live without dreaming — as we can’t live without sleep. We are “conscious” beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep — the “unconscious.” It is nourishing, in ways we can’t fully understand."

"I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture — no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened."

"I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing — for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing."

"Constant interruptions are the destruction of imagination."

"Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."

"When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity — but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial."

"Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself."

"A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same."

"Contemporary writers and artists praised her style, feared her tongue; she was a beauty, but a talented, acerbic, and powerfully intelligent one."

"Complex in her privacy, refusing to be controlled by an audience or pinioned to a single representation, she once told Henry Ramont of the New York Times, "I used to be invited by people who said, 'Get Djuna for dinner, she's amusing.' So I stopped it.""

"She was a spendthrift of the spirit, an American in Paris when, as Evelyn Waugh said, the going was good."

"Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact."

"Sleep demands of us a guilty immunity. There is not one of us who, given an eternal incognito, a thumbprint nowhere set against our souls, would not commit rape, murder and all abominations."

"The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment."

"I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat."

"The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections."

"We watched her come with subtle fire And learned feet, Stumbling among the lustful drunk Yet somehow sweet. We saw the crimson leave her cheeks Flame in her eyes; For when a woman lives in awful haste A woman dies. The jests that lit our hours by night And made them gay, Soiled a sweet and ignorant soul And fouled its play."

"One sees you sitting in the sun Asleep; With the sweeter gifts you had And didn't keep, One grieves that the altars of Your vice lie deep."

"What turn of body, what of lust Undiced? So we've worshipped you a little More than Christ."

"Somewhere beneath her hurried curse, A corpse lies bounding in a hearse; And friends and relatives disperse, And are not stirred."

"Ah God! she settles down we say; It means her powers slip away It means she draws back day by day From good or bad."

"What turn of card, what trick of game Undiced? And you we valued still a little More than Christ."

"Someday beneath some hard Capricious star — Spreading its light a little Over far, We'll know you for the woman That you are."

"There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole."

"We are adhering to life now with our last muscle — the heart."

"The Seal, she lounges like a bride, Much too docile, there's no doubt; Madame Récamier, on side, (if such she has), and bottom out."

"Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?"

"Suffering for love is how I have learned practically everything I know, love of grandmother up and on."

"If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class. It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for — or ignored."

"Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, "What's the use?" Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. … Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born."

"Well, isn’t Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else — and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?"

"After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat."

"New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American."

"I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure."

"We are beginning to wonder whether a servant girl hasn’t the best of it after all. She knows how the salad tastes without the dressing, and she knows how life’s lived before it gets to the parlor door."

"One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it."