Quotes from Sharon Olds

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But and I are savages.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven't managed that with drinking!

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.

At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

A family is a mystery.