Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.

Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will.

There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.

In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.

I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

We've learned to see the world in gasps.