[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructiveto be bitter.

Adventure: the pursuit of life.

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going.

Justice should be cheap but judges expensive.

I always have a very strong sense of shaming oneself, and you can do that a lot in the public eye, so it's best avoided at all costs I think.

We need a repeated discipline, a genuine training, in order to let go of our old habits of mind and to find and sustain a new way of seeing.

Ive read an awful lot of books, Ive read alot of awful books

We have to fight the past to survive.

That even in its sharpest pangs of pain a dog can still caress its master we have learnt from the studies of vivisectors.

I can't have just anybody assisting me, I need somebody who I can really communicate with.