“I think the highest duty of a writer is to write well—to leave the language in better rather than worse shape after one’s passage. That’s an ethical obligation. Language is the body, and also the soul, of consciousness.”

“Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long-haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, ups, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy. Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment…

“Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow funnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.”

“Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much.”

“Women should lobby, demonstrate, march….They should whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizable numbers to militant lesbianism, provide feminist divorce counseling, establish make-up withdrawal centers, adopt their mothers’ family names…”

“What makes me feel strong? Being in love and work. I must work.”

“In a time of destruction, create something.”

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”

“There is no one right way to experience what I’ve written… I write—and talk—in order to find out what I think.”