When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

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

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.

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

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.

If you want to do things, do things.

If I miss anything, it's being able to hang out in the city of New York meeting people and talking to them on the corner.