Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You need to be distracted.
"Time" does not mean "occasion."
It is true that my characters have sex.
Poetics is a science for stammering poets.
I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.
I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.
My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.
Working women went through a time when they believed that.
If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.
One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.
Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."
After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?
I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.
Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth.
Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.
I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.
Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.
I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.
The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.
I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.
Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.
Sometimes the taproot and the vines are far apart. Like English and the Asian poem.
When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."
The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.
When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.
I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.
Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.
With so many brothers, I could always find a pair of shorts to borrow and run around in.
I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.
[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.
I do not think a similar goal, to attain fame, drove me when I was a child and young woman.
In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.
In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.
I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.
My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.
Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.
In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.
Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.
I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."
There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.
When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.
Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.
The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
I have some weak poems in that new collection, which is why I'm not ready to send the collection out yet.