I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo -- that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

The fetus wished to live. Stubbornly, sometimes astonishingly-the fetus struggled to live. But the power of its life-or its death-had to reside with the mother. No other alternative was possible.

Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.

Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.

While there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' -- the very verb 'writing' -- always implies masculinity.

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, Why are you trying to starve yourself? To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects -- which perhaps, one day, I will develop.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time and Space- who else?

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

Boxing is an American sport -- a 'so-called sport' to many -- in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions -- loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living -- we who have survived -- understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.