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I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.

The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

I don't think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the 'Comedy Central Roasts' for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.

I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.