Once in a while I catch myself wondering whether I would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

No matter what anybody says, we can't have it all. Not if you are a woman. Not yet.

Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

Sometimes a word or an argument will trigger a poem.

Soyinka's Death at Dawn, Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning and Wislawa Szymborska's Some People come to mind immediately. But there are plenty, plenty more that I enjoy.