In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

What happens when a female writer invokes a female muse? Does something else happen? With Sappho's figures of desire, we have a different lesbian energy.

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.