Much more killing has been done by people who believed in heaven than by those who didn’t. - Alicia Ostriker

No writer should be without writing cohorts. You go mad. Even Emily Dickinson, famous for weaving a web of solitude round herself, had numerous literary friendships.

There was a beautiful stretch of time-the sixties, early seventies-when everybody's musical culture was together, and that was great. But now the shared culture is television commercials.

I write as a poet for a general audience, I write as a woman, I write as a Jew, and there are communities of readers for whom these identities are deeply important. Still, I never permanently shake the old sorrow of feeling in some way essentially isolated. I suppose it goes with the territory of any creative life.