“I was taught you don't tell your secrets to strangers - certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure. My generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements rece...”

“New York, for decades, offered a perpetual series of 'golden ages' to artists. You constantly had to measure yourself against the best, and you had to watch them, which meant that your imagination ...”

“As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back ...”

“Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain ...”

“What's often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.”

“I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“She's the kind of girl who brings you to the moon without you even being aware. The kind of girl you trip in love with, The kind of girl you never forget.”

“Not every story is about a girl who dreams of romance, waiting impatiently and dramatically for a tall, handsome, strong man to fall hopelessly in love with, in the foolish hope that he will protec...”

“But perhaps she has given me the strength and the madness to write about the things that I once desired so long to put against the world.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”