Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.
Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.
Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included.
Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.
Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember?
I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Turning fifty ... is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
I have a very sensitive nose. I identify with dogs. I understand the world through my nose.
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Every time I catch myself saying, "Oh no, you shouldn't try that," I think, "Yes, I should."
It is for this, partly, that I write. How can I know what I think unless I see what I write.
Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.
Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.
Few women see power as an end in itself. The point of power is the freedom to cultivate roses.
Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.
It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.
A Soul is partly given, partly wrought; remember always that you are the Maker of your own Soul.
Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?
People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.
each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.
You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.
Perhaps every generation thinks of itself as a lost generation and perhaps every generation is right.
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
Women who bear children before they establish serious habits of work, may never establish them at all.
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.
The sexuality doesn't end. It really doesn't. You're sexual your whole life, if you're a sexual person.
I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.
Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.
Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.
When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.
I mostly hate organized religion, which I think is a force for the oppression of women and creates warfare.
A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.
I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.
I think I've become more cynical about sex. Meaning, I don't think sex in and of itself leads to an epiphany.
We find our calling or it finds us, and it's a sin against the fates not to use your talent when you have it.
The Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em.
You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
Writers are always at the edge of the inferno, and the fire is licking at our toes. Luckily, this turns us on!
Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.
My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.