... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

Death persecutes before it executes.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.