I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

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

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?