I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

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.

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

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

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