A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding...

Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

Your love to me was like an unread book.

I try for a poetic language that says, This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do.

Life excites me-just little, normal, everyday things. Getting out of bed. Getting dressed. Making food. I find it all exciting.

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.

We’re all taking on too much, we’re all asking too much of ourselves. We’re all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more.

Women have been given reason to recognize a lot of things that have been covered up for a long time. What preceded the rage was a lot of anxiety.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

I always knew would be some sort of artist, but didn’t know what.

I simply do not distinguish between work and play.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a… How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.

Scrooge pushed past Mary number 1 and Joseph number 2 in the wings without so much as an “excuse me”. Typical.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.

My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I’ve been teaching myself computer graphics, so I’m reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts.

I am scared of becoming a mother.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.

My poems – I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our...

Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.

Here we have a baby. It is composed of a bald head and a pair of lungs.

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

But only God can make a tree.

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.

Well, “The Wellspring” was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others’ experience.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.

I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it’s fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.

I certainly think it’s worth making an effort to write about certain important things, as I made an effort to write about the war.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it’s a poem, it’s almost written in my...

Drawn by warm nostalgic feelings for the place and by two sweet little words: “Open Bar.”

Life on the planet is born of woman.

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

My wife used to tell me one of my best qualities was that my feet don’t smell, but I remember my brother’s did when we were kids.

Sure, my childhood was unusual. All these eccentric, wild people frequented our home: rock stars, drag queens, models, bikers, freaks. But I was not this little rich girl. My mom and I lived in an...

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven’t managed that with drinking!

It doesn’t seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

He played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace.

How shall I speak of Doom, and ours in special, But as of something altogether common?

Various on-line discussion groups are ways to find out about books and writers that one might have remained ignorant of otherwise.

There is no definition of beauty, but when you can see someone’s spirit coming through, something unexplainable, that’s beautiful to me.

Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the...

Well, one thing I’m really interested in, when I’m writing, is being accurate.

I must have some sort of record in failing to get into the charts.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

I look for poetry in English because it’s the only language I read.