Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
There is still the feeling that women’s writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.
Courage is the only Magic worth having.
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion.
A baby’s a full time job for three adults. Nobody tells you that when you’re pregnant, or you’d probably jump off a bridge. Nobody tells you how all-consuming it is to be a mother-how reading goes out the window and thinking too.
I can live without it all – love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.
When I’m sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it’s silence and despair! It’s not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
In a world not made for women, criticism and ridicule follow us all the days of our lives. Usually they are indications that we are doing something right.
Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.
People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn’t. Social attitudes don’t change in a straight line. There’s always a backlash against progressive ideas.
Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.
I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.
Is there no Villain in this World who doth not regard himself as a poor abus’d Innocent, no She-Wolf who doth not think herself a Lamb, no Shark who doth not fancy that she is a Goldfish?
Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn’t good, it wasn’t poetry. It was that simple.
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.