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

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.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

Every American deserves to live in freedom, to have his or her privacy respected and a chance to go as far as their ability and effort will take them - regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or economic circumstances.

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

The thing is there have been American movies that are similar to Solaris, like Alien had a lot of things that are similar, although it's also got the horror element.

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.

The generic Canadian style of illustration is different from the generic American style.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.

And while the U.S. can never be 100 percent safe from a future strike, our government is working around the clock on measures to protect the American people.

All we're getting from the Democratic majority in Congress and from this White House is more bailouts, more spending, more planned stimulus, more deficits and debt, and the American people have had it.

Who cares about that stuff? This is America, not Jerusalem. I'm an American. Let Harry be a Jew.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

No one will burn out doing aerobic running. It is too much anaerobic running, which the American scholastic athletic system tends to put young athletes through, that burns them out.

I was on TV for almost sixteen weeks during American Idol. It's at the point now where it's old.