Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.

There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

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 went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.

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