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...

All my boys make me laugh.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

The decision for me was whether to have “The Father” be a book that told a story – from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter – without, as in the earlier books,...

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence.

I’ve been in Paris as much as I could be, which includes living here for longer stretches of time, then eventually just living here tout court.

Working with Bernardo Bertolucci was one of the greatest highlights of my whole life. It was such an incredible opportunity for me.

It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who...

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

I like to think of myself as being fashion-conscious without being a slave to fashion.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I’m given the illustration first.

In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.

Pressed caviar has the consistency of chilled tar.

The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and...

Things explain each other, not themselves.