America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
Belief, like love, must be voluntary.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
