What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit.

I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.