Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

Divorce is my generation's coming of age ceremony - a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

I am never so calm as after I have written. And the next morning I will feel the familiar anxiety and I will have to begin the process all over again.

Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.

the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

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.

Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.