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Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.

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Women are individuals in parenting, and why not?

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My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.

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

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I don't think there's just one person for everyone. It would be very hard for me to be with a guy who was not bright or funny. And he'd have to see the absurdities of the world, not exactly as I see them necessarily.

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I remember everything but forgive anyway.

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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.

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

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

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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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I've never been able to control my public image.

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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.

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

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My grandchildren are fabulous and funny.

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It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

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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.

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