I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.

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.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.

We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.

It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.

Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.