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.

I worked probably 25 years by myself, just writing and working, not trying to publish much, not giving readings.

Certainly, it seems true enough that there’s a good deal of irony in the world… I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there’s obviously a lot of deception.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

Kristin Brown looks as though she could have been mailed first-class to New York for about a dollar and a half.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

The situation of the Old Left was the theory of Socialist Realism, etc. It seemed pointless to argue. We stayed carefully away from people who wrote for the New Masses.

Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.

I don’t think a lot of really good films get seen.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages’ horrors at the same time.

Mandelstam’s wife committed all his poems to memory in fear that both he and his poems would be destroyed by Stalin.

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.

Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to.

When I edited Thirteenth Moon, a feminist literary magazine, I basically supported it myself with an essential grant here and there.

When I was pregnant. I exercised and was healthy, but it was also the first time since I was 14 that I wasn’t on a diet.

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me, a lonely you.

When I quit all these things and said I didn’t have any time, I meant I didn’t have any time.

Money cannot buy happiness.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.

I would go to sketch groups and draw. I really enjoyed the subject matter, but I wasn’t good at it.

If I’ve done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that… That may be...

I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do this job well. And the time never came back.

Grown men have been seen fleeing after reading the menu posted outside.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn’t. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished...