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.

I have a basic indolence about me which is essential to writing. ... It's thinking time, it's hanging-out time, it's daydreaming time. You know, it's lie-around-the-bed time, it's sitting-like-a-dope-in-your-chair time. And that seems to me essential to any work.

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.

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

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn't live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends "got relief." That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.