The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

We all have paid the cost of our success.

It's one of the advantages of being a woman. I get to do all sorts of unfair things, and you have to accept them because you're too polite not to. --Polgara

...sitting and waiting is one of the most miserable occupations known to man - not that it usually is known to men; women do it much more often.

Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. I'm no longer on earth.

Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

Mickey Cohen: New York, its like being a rat in a maze, everyone living on top of each other, but out here, I can breathe. I love Los Angeles.

All of my policy is not based on a label. It's based on what I lived and what I know.

Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.

Though the power be wanting, yet the wish is praiseworthy.

Peace and negativity cannot coexist just as light and darkness cannot coexist.