I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell-tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.