Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

When you connect with nature, you will create yourself.

Those who positively matter in your life, would never dare you to go out of your way to please them and displease yourself.

He's a waiter, not a Mafia stooge, so what's he going to do? Blac pepper them to death? Compliment them into a coma? Run them over with the dessert trolley?

Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

Whoever thought to name a candy bar Butterfinger has either never seen Last Tango In Paris or seen it far too many times.

If thy heart fails thee, climb not at all.

If the search is for examples that contradict the predictions of standard economic models, a good rule of thumb is to start in France.

Each man must learn his own ideal and try to accomplish it: that is a surer way of progress than to take the ideas of another.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.