You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

A relationship with young people is very important to me. It's important to have a sense of what's going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is a gift.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

I see women as oppressed, but I don't see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.

If you want to do things, do things.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

Most of the Women's Libbers I knew really didn't want to have a piece of the men's pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn't even want a slice of.

Poets take themselves very seriously.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

That's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they're extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average with a good education.

What I generally tell a class is that if you're not interested in anybody else's work but your own, take another class.

What I'm interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

Whatever you do, life don't stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

The word career is a divisive word. Its a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

Hindsight usually looked down upon is probably as valuable as foresight since it does include a few facts.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

Waves, once they land on the beach, are not reversible.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

Well, after I had the heart attack, it was a very simple choice. What the doctor told me I did and I did it religiously. I ate nothing but lean turkey breast or chicken breast or a piece of fish that was very lean. I mean I stayed away from everything.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

Excuses change nothing, but make everyone feel better.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

They haul you up there for, you know, week after week in this kind of star chamber proceeding. Then at the end of it they say, well, we found nothing, but now it's time for special counsel.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

For years the Trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We practically starved to death.

There's nothing worse than talking about yourself to find out that you're not that interesting.

In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.

If nothing is to be done in the given situation, he must invent plausible reasons for doing nothing; and if something must be done, he must suggest the something. The unpardonable sin is to propose nothing, when action is imperative.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment - and nothing more corrupting.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

I think I had a more European outlook about the body and sex. The body is in no way dirty, and sex is something beautiful to give to and share with a lover. It has nothing to do with promiscuity, because I only believe in being in love with one man at a time.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.