Sharon Olds

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

— Sharon Olds

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by…

— Sharon Olds

... sometimes I can feel it, the way we are pouring slowly toward a curve and around it through something dark and…

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

“He fell in love with her because I didn't suit him anymore - nor him, me, though I could not see it,…

— Sharon Olds

A family is a mystery.

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

“The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other. I do…

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

“There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All, Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small; A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost…

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I…

— Sharon Olds

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

— Sharon Olds

“If I could choose, a place to die,” it would never have been in your arms, old darling”

— Sharon Olds

“each hour is a room of shame, and I am swimming, swimming, holding my head up, smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed, like being…

— Sharon Olds

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we…

— Sharon Olds

“The End of World War One Out of the scraped surface of the land men began to emerge, like puppies from the…

— Sharon Olds

I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to…

— Sharon Olds

“Where have I been while this person is leading my life with her patience, will and order? In the garden; on the…

— Sharon Olds

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of…

— Sharon Olds