Writing is harmless, and it keeps me in dinners and out of trouble.

Writing can be (among other things), a safety valve. (1949)

I went home with the resolve to write what I knew and to trust my own thoughts and feelings and to not look outside myself. I was not in school anymore: I could say what I wanted.

But that day there was a pen, I took it and started writing. After a while, a certain calm came over me, I felt better. Maybe that was a survival instinct.

Write whatever the blast you want, and if you live in an environment where doing so doesn't endanger your life or career, count yourself blessed.

I knew I was doing things different but at the same time I was doing things that were very natural for me … I wasn’t trying to break any rules. But I wrote the way I heard things.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing.

I am very comfortable writing as a man, and I think that’s because I had really good men in my life. They made me feel comfortable and I thought, ‘OK, they’re not so different from me…’

Tense, unnerved, and close to madness before writing—and when I read what I’ve written it looks so calm.

. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.
I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

Meditation helped me to access the same thing my writing did: my intelligence and my instincts beyond the turmoil that inhabited the forefront of my mind.

Much written history is an ideologically safe commodity.

I write so slowly, I could write with my own blood and not hurt myself.