I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

a handful of crumpled stars

And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.