Prizes aren't essential. What is essential is poetry itself, it's what is said, it is clarity, it's loyalty, those are the essential values, the literary values.

People ask me why I am a feminist. Because I am a woman of freedom and equality and it is not possible to have freedom in the world when half of humanity has no rights. Because we are more than half of humanity. There are more women than men. This is not a fight of so-called "minorities."

I think that all my books are political, I think that I have a political body of work. I am essentially a political woman, but above all I am a poet. I am a poetess.

I think the obligation of a poet is not to be in an ivory tower; it is not to be isolated but to be among people.

People ask me almost every day, "Why? You are successful, you have kids, you have grandchildren, so why?" Feminist women are seen as unsatisfied. But all women in the world, if they are well aware of inequality, are unsatisfied women. They don't have the same rights as men, and there is no freedom until there is equality between men and women.

As a journalist, I never isolated myself. I was a journalist at a daily newspaper and every day I went out on the street. Every day I had contact with people. I interviewed the most important writers of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first century, from Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Marguerite Yourcenar to Christa Wolf.

Men use women sexually. They use them, mistreat them, even from the point of view of vocabulary, the use of words. It baffles me.