“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”

“Nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction.”

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”

“The creative act is not pure.”

“You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.”

“They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space--atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there for...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”