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

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

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

The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time.

Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.

We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

My idea of Hell is to be young again.