Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.

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

To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society

Poetry is not a luxury.

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.