The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?

Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.

It is harder for women, perhaps to be 'one-pointed,' much harder for them to clear space around whatever it is they want to do beyond household chores and family life. Their lives are fragmented... the cry not so much for a 'a room of one's own' as time of one's own. Conflict become acute, whatever it may be about, when there is no margin left on any day in which to try at least to resolve it.

Do I think there's life after death? No, I think my books are my life after death.

He [the cat] wound himself around her legs, purring the purr of ardent desire like a kettle coming to a boil and then bubbling very fast.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.