It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.
Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.
In a dream you are never eighty.
The joy that isn't shared dies young.
I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.
I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.
Even without wars, life is dangerous.
God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
Death's in the good-bye.
Need is not quite belief.
I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.
Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.
These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.
Before I was married, I had never washed one dish or seen how you fried an egg or baking a potato.
