I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Is there no way out of the mind?

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).

Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

Every woman adores a Fascist.

Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.

Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

How we need another soul to cling to.

I am a victim of introspection.

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.

I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea.

I have a visual imagination.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.

I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.

I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.

I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched.

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.