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

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 accepted versions of the Bible are all substantially correct.

As I have studied the Bible and the Book of Mormon, I have come to know through the power of the Spirit of God, that these books contain the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I have continued systematically to study the Book of Mormon and Bible to understand even more deeply what God expects of me and my family while on this earth.

There are any number of people who profess to be good Christian people who are willing to believe all kinds of things on suspicion. Now that is not the way the Bible directs for Christian people to do.

Many of us view the bible and other religious teachings as mythology.

It is to be deeply regretted that the clergymen would oppose an effort to teach the people the Bible truths; nevertheless, we find much opposition everywhere, and many clergymen will attempt to prevent the people from reading what is here written.

If the president is going to use so much language of theology and the Bible, then let's use that language for a serious discussion about the war in Iraq. And that was never done.

So after the Lewinsky scandal, everything changed, and we moved from using the Bible to address the moral issues of our time, which were social, to moral issues of our time that were very personal. I have continued that relationship up until the present.

There are matters in the Bible, said to be done by the express commandment of God, that are shocking to humanity and to every idea we have of moral justice.

When I commit, I commit with my whole heart, my whole being. I know the Bible like the back of my hand.

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

I've read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

Accordingly the Northern races of Europe found their inspiration in the Bible; and the enthusiasm for it has not yet quite faded away.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

The Bible is proved to be a revelation from God, by the reasonableness and holiness of its precepts; all its commands, exhortations, and promises having the most direct tendency to make men wise, holy, and happy in themselves, and useful to one another.

Political freedom is a political reading of the Bible.