To identify the enemy is to free the mind.

I’ve been spending this last month trying to find four outfits to wear to the different premieres of The Two Towers. It’s hard work.

It’s a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body – the senses are part of the brain. I guess they’re not where the thinking is done.

When you get over the anxiety, you discover you should have been mad a long time ago.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

I accept challenges, I have always done that in writing.

I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.

In the simplest terms, a leader is one who knows where she wants and gets up and goes.

I didn’t have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.

I’ve been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

The age I’m at now, you go from being a young girl to suddenly you blossom into a woman. You ripen, you know? And then you start to rot.

I’ve had trouble with criticism, I guess. It’s hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more...

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...