It's important to know what you're going to spend your life on, and the only way you're going to find that is by connecting with the force inside yourself.

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

Friends love misery... our misery is what endears us to our friends.

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

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.