I don't think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.

Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

I've kept journals at many times in my life starting from when I was about 13 or 14. But it's boring and contrived to keep a journal every day. Better to write as the mood strikes.

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.

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?

I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

of all the foolish Fears of Humankind, Fear of the Future is by far the most foolish.