Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

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

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

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

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.