“Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?”

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.

What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.

Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.

I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.

When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.

That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

He is not likely to learn who is not willing to be taught; for the learner has something to do, as well as the teacher.

I don’t care what studio I’m in, I don’t care what producers is producing it and I don’t care what song it is because they taught me those things I feel so protected wherever I go as far as music.

Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.

Time and experience have taught me that fame and money very rarely go to the worthy, by the way – hence we shouldn’t ever be too impressed by either of those impostors. Value folk for who they are, how they live and what they give – that’s a much better benchmark.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Truth cannot be taught but it is quickly recognised by the person ready to discover it.

We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.

The rock and roll spirit. I learned a lot of that because I worked with Buddy Holly. I played bass with him, and he taught me a lot about that.