People Begin To Write In Order To

Beauty Is A Hard Thing. Beauty Is A Mean Story. Beauty Is Slender Girls Who Die Young, Fine-featured Delicate Creatures About Whom Men Write Poems. Beauty, My First Girlfriend Said To Me, Is That Inner Quality Often Associated With Great Amounts Of Leisure Time. And I Loved Her For That.

I Think I Would Have Died If There Hadn't Been The Women's Movement.

I Told Her, Don't Touch Me That Way. Don't Come At Me With That Sour-cream Smile. Come At Me As If I Were Worth Your Life - The Life We Make Together. Take Me Like A Turtle Whose Shell Must Be Cracked, Whose Heart Is Ice, Who Needs Your Heat. Love Me Like A Warrior, Sweat Up To Your Earlobes And All Your Hope Between Your Teeth. Love Me So I Know I Am At Least As Important As Anything You Have Ever Wanted.

I Was Born In 1949, And By The Time I Was 10, I Figured Out That My Hope Chest Was Not Aimed In The Same Direction Everybody Else's Was. And That Life Was Going To Be Very, Very Complicated. And That I Could Either Be Provocative And Declamatory, Or Shy, Retiring And Scared.

I'm Still Very Blunt: If You Want To Be A Writer, Get A Day Job. The Fact That I Have Actually Been Able To Make A Living At It Is Astonishing.