Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

The word career is a divisive word. It’s a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

I developed a definition – which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world – that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way...

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Whatever you do, life don’t stop. It only sits a minute and dreams a dream.

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer – nothing else.

I didn’t write any fiction until I was past thirty.

What I’m interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it… Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

The only thing you should have to do is find work you love to do. And I can’t imagine living without having loved a person. A man, in my case. It could be a woman,...

If you want to do things, do things.

I see women as oppressed, but I don’t see them as victims; I see them rising all the time. I see them as very strong.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

That’s the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they’re extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they’re just average with a good education.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

A relationship with young people is very important to me. It’s important to have a sense of what’s going on in their world and not just in my own. So the opportunity teaching provides is...

I drank a little California Mountain Red at home and thought–why not–wherever you turn someone is shouting give me liberty of I give you death. Perfectly sensible, thing-owning, Church-fearing neighbours flop their hands over their...

Most of the Women’s Libbers I knew really didn’t want to have a piece of the men’s pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds...

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it’s a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in...

‘The Immigrant Story,’ which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn’t think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this...

Poets take themselves very seriously.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women’s movement. I didn’t know my small-drop...

What I generally tell a class is that if you’re not interested in anybody else’s work but your own, take another class.

The younger people with the ache of youth were eating all the cheese.

I don’t believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person’s senses.

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn’t help me to understand the world I lived in.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.