Sharon Olds quotes:

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

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.

Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.

I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

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.

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

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.

Seeing yourself as responsible for the quality of your relationship, as a prime mover in your life, I think is a bold, amazing step.

Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.

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

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.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

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

It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it.

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.

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

I was very afraid that I wouldn't be able to do this job well. And the time never came back.

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

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

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.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.

When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

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

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

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

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and soft, and we are bound to each other.

A family is a mystery.

Every poet I know - although there may be some I don't know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don't teach - tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.

Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

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

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first.

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.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.

Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.

She'd crack A joke sharp as a tin lid Hot from the teeth of the can-opener, And cackle her crack-corn laugh.

The older I get, the more I feel

The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.

To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done.

We're all taking on too much, we're all asking too much of ourselves. We're all wishing we could do more, and therefore just doing more.

When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.

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.