It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

A lot of sad things have happened to my friends' children, people you knew as babies. They've been killed or become crazy or all kinds of tragic things. There are some people whose children haven't talked to them in fifteen years. There's all kind of meshugaas in this world.

Good talkers are people who use interesting language and have a lot of energy in speech and who also listen.

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

It wasn't until I lived in the countryside that I began to understand the life of the countryside and the people in it and trees and water. Just learning about water is an education for a city person.

Women should stick together. Didn’t you learn anything yet?