When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.

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.

Trust Oh Trust me please. Dont turn and freeze. Have faith in me & let me put a frost in your tears. Once you hear it ends with

Nowadays, our lifestyle is to follow the herd than to use the head.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

We can win the struggle to avoid responsibility for our personal lives, but if we do, what we lose is our lives.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

I just like that balance of the real and the fantastical because as a reader and consumer of stories and fantasy, I always want to feel like I can find that world.

The true measure of what you put in, is what's received on the other end.

I am the expert on battery life.

... a thirst for power is the natural disease of monarchy.

Believe it or not, Id love to go to the moon.