You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

I am against censorship. I prefer the chaos of uncontrollable communication of all sorts to selective banning of certain materials. I do not think human beings can be trusted to be above politics and to promote the common good. One group's common good is another group's evil.

The older we get, the more Jewish we become in my family.

Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.

I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.

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.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.