“No work is so important you have to do it.”

“My feeling about work is that it's an unnecessary evil, so I've always done my best to avoid it.”

“To avoid starvation is the only excuse for working.”

“If your work is stressful, it's not your work.”

“The spiritual life to me has always meant just one thing: feeling.”

“I don't want to be the one who says life is beautiful. I want to be the one who feels it.”

“I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.”

“The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.”

“The willingness to reach inside every part of yourself opens the door to total understanding. You place your entire identity on the line, not just an isolated part. This may sound daunting, but act...”

“People are too complicated to have simple labels.”

“I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.”

“People don't want other people to be people.”

“England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on the truth of the whole matter is very simp...”