Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally.

Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don't you dare have ideas I don't share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don't want to do that. I sure don't want it done to me!

Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.

When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.