“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.”

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

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

Conflict is the soul of literature.

You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.

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 best of them will work alone, already a part of the enemy camp, and in chameleon-like style master the fifth-column algorithms to subvert the ancient regime.

I only translate authors whose work already interests me as a reader, and that’s a decision I make based on multiple encounters with an author’s work.

Often people who already had an interest in human rights work.

The Futurists?…. Well, of course, they are already past.

To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.

Dubai’s world class physical infrastructure has already established it as a major player in terms of trade tourism and as the leading conference and exhibition venue in this part of the world.

Or maybe I’d lost my soul already. I doubted God let someone like me keep any gift from him. It was highly likely I’d been born without one.

The simplest answer is to act.