Marilyn Hacker

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.