“I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.”

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

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.

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.

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

I don’t know what the definition of pornography is and nobody else does either. Pornography is somebody else’s erotica that you don’t like.

Don’t ye know that ev’ry Soul on Earth feels itself to be an Orphan?

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

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

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.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

I don’t think that sex necessarily produces intimacy.

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

And what if I don’t want forgiveness?

The soul is awakened through service.

I have alternately been called an Aristocrat and a Democrat. I am neither. I am a Christocrat.

Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

A good way to work on alternate picking is to choose three or four notes, and work on those.

Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.

I like having options, alternate lives unlived but always possible.