If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss.

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.

Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.

If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.

Life has no beginning, middle or end.

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.

There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names-but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.

I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin.

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

When the dream came into being, I always pursued it.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.

Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.

I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

Love is an obsession. It has that quality to it. But there are healthy obsessions, and mine is one of them.

The obsessions we have are pretty much the same our whole lives. Mine are people, the human condition, life.

In my work, I explore my own Catholic obsessions.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

All women who kill or have sexual obsessions or who are prostitutes have trouble with their fathers.

Obsessions turn people off.

When 'Main Rahoon' released, it became a hit with the youth.

Prisons and jails, I tend to feel that you're actually safer as a journalist than you might think, certainly more than it appears.

The first session of the Congress of the United States under the Constitution was devoted principally to the problems of immediate revenues and administrative and judicial organization.

I like people like Robert De Niro and Anthony Hopkins. And Gianfranco Zola, who played for Chelsea and Italy. He's an artist with his feet.

Fortunately, I was supposed to look confused and disoriented because, God, I felt that way.