The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.

I love planting. I love digging holes, putting plants in, tapping them in. And I love weeding, but I don't like tidying up the garden afterwards.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

When I moved out here to California, I became obsessed with geology. It's impossible not to be interested in the earth if you live in a place like this. I started to read a lot of geology, much to the horror of my friends.

What distinguished my life from my brother's is that my mother didn't like me. When I became a woman, I seemed to repel her.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.