You don't get to choose what you get famous for and you don't get to control which of your life's many struggles gets to stand for you.

Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.

The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.