Love is everything it’s cracked up to be.
Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.
A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
Women’s books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it’s a woman, she’s ‘spilling her guts,’ and it’s not art.
We don’t have a clear path forward, and that’s been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.
I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It’s amazing. They don’t see any stigma attached to it. We don’t need a man to prove our identity anymore.
I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching – but that won’t pay the Bergdorf’s bill. I think I’ll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
I think feminism means what it has always meant – women want to use all their gifts, all their talents and be judged impartially for them. I don’t think feminism has ever meant anything else.
I’m interested in what happens to people when they get into that publicity machine. We tend to think things have changed, but there’s still a deep sexism underlying the way women are treated publicly.
Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.
When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it’s a wonderful way to spend one’s life.
My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
Every time women make tremendous strides, the right wing gets terrified and creates laws making it hard to get an abortion or birth control.
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
Anybody who instantly goes from being a poet and a graduate student to being a public figure has to be in a state of shock. First people want to praise you, and then they want to attack you. No one can prepare you for it.
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting ‘Hiawatha’ and they groan.
This is the sad bed of chosen chastity because you are miles and mountains away.
The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.
The worst thing about jealousy is how low it makes you reach.
I don’t think that I had any idea that ‘Fear of Flying’ would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.