I'm always amazed when young women who are having babies want their husbands to watch the babies come out. I would never allow anything like that.

Life is given to you like a flat piece of land and everything has to be done. I hope that when I'm finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden.

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

I shall die very young...maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young.

As long as you don't make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that's condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.

Something pretty... that's just the surface. People worry so much about aging, but you look younger if you don't worry about it.

I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism.

If you get trapped in the idea that what is most important is what image of yourself you're giving to the world, you're on a dangerous path.

To be free means to choose, whose slave you want to be. ­

If you want to live your life through to the end, you have to live dangerously.

To give and receive love, you have to be in touch with pain, you have to be capable of provoking it and feeling it.

The perplexity, the potential— God’s own crucible was not for angels.

If you venture to be a sageLet your virtues subside your rageFor deep wisdom you’ll be veneratedLet cold veins feel blood cells generated

They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962

With a smile that glow'd Celestial rosy red, love's proper hue.

Air ye deaf, lass?" I think. He might have called me a hairy jackass

The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a government.

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work - because you have to, because it’s your calling.

I didn't want to see George Hamilton playing me, I wanted the real thing.

What you are will make you what you will become.

I myself have perceived women's actions as more aggressive than I would have in men because I too am walking around with my own biases. The way to fight them is to become conscious of them.