... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

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.

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

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

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.