"Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God."

"The body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god's messenger."

"It takes courage to lead a life. Any life."

"Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?"

"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."

"Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household."

"I have not ceased being fearful but I have ceased to let fear control me."

"Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man."

"I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book."

"In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love."

"I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am."

"My grandchildren are fabulous and funny."

"Solitude is un-American."

"Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener."

"Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly."

"Men and women, women and men. It will never work."

"Women in America read 'lifestyle' pages which are really glorifications of shopping. They teach us we must veil ourselves in make-up to be loved. And we willingly take the veil, thinking ourselves freed by it. Make-up is no more optional for us than the veil is for Arab women: it is our Western version of the chador."

"Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood."

"It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present, how much of daily life is usually spent making plans and attempting to control the future. Never mind that you have no control over it. The idea of the future is our greatest entertainment, amusement, and time-killer."

"Readers who think I have answers when all I have are a few pointed questions."

"Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately."

"The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead."

"Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway."

"What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave."

"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."

"I was afraid to write Fear of Flying ergo I had to write it. I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it then I must do it."

"Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover."

"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."

"The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy."

"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't."

"What all the ads and whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your har, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever."

"I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other being good to each other."

"Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed."

"Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness."

"Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness."

"The soul is awakened through service."

"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."

"Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared."

"Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love."

"The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad."

"He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it."

"Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads."

"We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box."

"In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons."

"Famous people complain about fame, but they never want to give it back, myself included."

"Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have."

"If you don't risk anything, you risk even more."

"Young women dream of romance and passion as men dream of conquest because those dreams are necessary goads to leaving home and growing up."

"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."

"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."