I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.

We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual.

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.

Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street.

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.