To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.