Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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.
