I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Even a poet cannot get everything right.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.