All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face.

There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap.

If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.

I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced.

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person.

An audience sabotages my freedom, devastates my innocence, corrupts my integrity, inhibits my great joy - and of course gives me further to fall.

Poetry is a big space and I love it.

When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.

I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.

At least as a single woman, I had time to pursue my own interests, read voraciously, and travel when opportunity presented.

Put no limit to your thinking or you can never go far and never find the truth!

One thing above all gives charm to men's thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.

In great cities where people of ability abound, there is always a feverish urge to keep ahead, to set the pace, to adopt each new fashion in thought and theory as well as in dress - or undress.

Everything passes. There is great beauty in this, both in the passing of pain and in the passing of pleasure. When things present themselves to you as permanent, don't believe it.

When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was a member of the Y.M.C.A.

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Sleep is the best time to repair, but it's hard to get a good night's rest when we don't dial the inner chatter down.

Leaders will have to give clear and decisive leadership towards a world of tolerance and respect for difference, and an uncompromising commitment to peaceful solutions of conflicts and disputes.

I believe in looseness.