If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.

Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old.

Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.

... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?