Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.

At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.

Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.