In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.