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" All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes. "

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" Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with. "

" Singularity shows something wrong in the mind. "

" It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. "

" 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. "

" I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When everyone thinks they know you, it's hard not to be guarded. "

" I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorized my vicious ones - like most writers. "

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

" 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. "

" At certain historic moments, grandparents took on childrearing responsibilities. In many cultures, they still do. Chinese grandparents who are able to retire at 55 are seen all over Beijing bouncing grandbabies. In the United States, we can't afford to retire at 55. "

" I think that Sappho expresses the orphaned part of ourselves. The orphaned part of ourselves that reaches out to passion for completion. That reaches out to motherhood for completion. "

" Ken, my husband, just smelled like he belonged to me. I'm not talking about hygiene. I'm talking about when you hug him, he either feels like a member of your tribe or not. It's their scent. "

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

" I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn't have to choose. And I believe that's always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately. "

" The trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. "

" I don't cook. My mother didn't cook. My daughter doesn't cook. "

" 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. "

" The problem with feminism in the second wave was that we fought so much among ourselves, and I think we did so much damage to the movement... and I think the next wave, the third wave, is women mentoring younger women and women helping younger women to enter the political process and the writing world. "

" And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. "

" The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise. "