At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

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.

Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.