In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving - instead of actually getting up and leaving.
When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded.
As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.
Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I'm not talking about hygiene. I'm talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It's their scent.
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.
There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.
I think professionalism is important, and professionalism means you get paid.
I've never been able to control my public image.
I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers.
Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.
Solitude is un-American.
I do a lot of teaching... and so I think I know how hard it is for young writers, how they have to work two jobs to survive.