Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.

You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

I have ne'er been in a chamber with a lawyer when I did not wish either to scream with desperation or else fall into the deepest of sleeps, e'en when the matter concern'd my own future most profoundly.