Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.

My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem--then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.

I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

There's another part of getting older that's just wonderful. Which is you see the way the stories turn out with peoples' lives.