I have a great ability to improvise verbally and I am very funny on a dime..

Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography..

Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear..

All my friends are artists, so I am used to collective agony as a mode..

I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arriva….

Like I'm dragging bundles of old clothes? I'm carrying artifacts that breathe fire. I'm talking about a language of smoke. These are three-dimensiona….

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you ba….

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves..

They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, ….

I knew a book of mine was finished when I was in intensive care..

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write be….

writing is about doing something very close to the bone. It's about shocking yourself. When I write, I like to make myself cry, laugh - I like to giv….

To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds..

The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or th….

Women have waited millions of years, growing separate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehen….

I believed in immaculate conception and spontaneous combustion. I believed in aliens from outer space and vampires, prophecy, and the resurrection of….

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full ….

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse..

If you can be anything else but a writer, be it..

I write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random; they have their own logic..