Popularity: 2
Vote:   | Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I believe only in art and failure. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was very frightened when I turned forty. I suddenly thought I ought to wake up and be speaking with the voice of God. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm a non-believer. I don't believe in the existence of a God. I don't believe in the Christian dogma. I find it horrifyingly silly. The intolerance that flows from organized religion is the most dangerous thing on the planet. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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 sort that would shock even the pessimists among us. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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 speaking presence. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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 commitments and pleasures is what I strive for. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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 and minds better. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better. |