My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

The ones who hate me the most are the ones who don't scare me.

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

Satisfaction with results will be the [death] knell of progress. No man is good who thinks that he cannot be better. He has no holiness who thinks that he is holy enough.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child, while not being loved as a child is loved, but merely being kept alive against one's will.

Familiarity breeds consent.

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

The capacity to become aware of the givens of our existence - such as change - and to actually welcome those as just part of our human experience releases the struggle.

Life asks of every individual a contribution, and it is up to that individual to discover what it should be