My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

I knew I was in England by the smell.

I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.

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.

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.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

we write as if our lives depended upon it. They do.