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.

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.

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.

My erotic poetry is not poetry that uses vernacular words. It is a very erotic poetry, but I never use anything, for example, that is not in the dictionary. I don't like to be ugly, I seek out what is beautiful, and if my great search is for freedom and beauty, I can't be vulgar, ordinary.

I think that if poetry is not a personal act, it's a pamphlet.

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

I think that one of the tasks of feminist women - mainly women of culture - in our time is to seek out those women who were only forgotten because they were women.