I believe only in art and failure..

It's not the length but the quality of life that matters to me. It has always been important to me to write one sentence at a time, to live every day….

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression..

Knowledge is a collective enterprise. Without it understanding is impossible. Ignorance is too often a murderous vulnerability..

If we don't bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a s….

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate..

I was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God..

The kinds of good friends I have are people who are perfectly willing to have me say I'll see them in six months, and live right next door..

As a writer, I must be free to say what is in all the diversity I can command. I regret the distorting prejudices that surround me, whether they affe….

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education..

The real power of books is their deep companionability. We learn from them as we learn from the deep companionability of love to know our own hearts ….

Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our moral….

This desert town was man's own miracle of pure purposelessness..

Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to express our new cons….

I remember how surprised I was when my first novel was about to be published and I was informed that I could be sued for anything any one of my chara….

I didn't want to be a boy, ever, but I was outraged that his height and intelligence were graces for him and gaucheries for me..

If the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sor….

My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of com….

Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't..

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think..

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and re….