I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent..

I try to teach my students style, but always as a part of life, not as ornament. Style has to come out of communicating coherent thought, not in stic….

I think most people dont like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly dont want anybody just to pick up my thoughts ….

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer..

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding g….

Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion..

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed..

Life has no beginning, middle or end..

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age..

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career..

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia..

If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss..

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormo….

Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?.

All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning..

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia,….

When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being….

The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women..

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and r….

we live our fate before we realize exactly what it is..

If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized..