More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That's quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That's equally sad, if not more so.
There is balance in life, but not fairness.
It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.
Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty.
Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.
At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations. What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.
It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.
I'm a member of the weeper sex.
I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you've always had.
I was the girl he had chosen to kiss. He wanted, somehow to set me free. He didn't want to burn my photo or toss it away, but he didn't want to look at me anymore, either.
What I love about African-African music is how unselfconscious it is in so many ways.