If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.

I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.