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

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.

The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.

The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

If we don't risk anything, we risk even more.

One writes not by will but by surrender.