I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.

There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.

I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that 'half the human race' had something to say about the nature of its existence.

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.

Mine is, after all, the generation that had come to maturity drinking in the forebodings of the Silones, Koestlers, and Richard Wrights. It had left us ill-prepared for decisions that had to be made in our own time about Algeria, Birmingham, or the Bay of Pigs.

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough - and I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.