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

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

... 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.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.