Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.

I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.

we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most hurt, most happy, most downcast, most jubilant. Poetry is the language we speak in times of greatest need. And the fact that it is an endangered species in our culture tells us that we are in deep trouble.

I am not sure if love is a salve or just a deeper kind of wound.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

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.

I'm interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there's still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly.