“I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a cer...” — Rosemary Mahoney Quote

I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop.

I fear that my mind would starve and that I might find myself in danger if I had no visual information, that it's chiefly the light, the shapes, the spaces, the colors that I see that compel me to keep moving forward in life and that keep me safe.

I wanted Lillian Hellman to be perfect because I wasn't perfect myself. I really wanted a mentor.

A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue.

I still have this image: I can't be controversial, I can't say things.

I've always tried to stay out of the fray and not be an object of controversy.

The greater the controversy, the more you need manners.

I was controversy's favorite wild child.

You need guts to deal with controversies.