Quote

I also started writing songs because I had this burning activity in my heart and had to express myself.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.