There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

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

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

…I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they’re lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

I didn't intend. The word "intend" is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word "intend" is wrong. The word "pressure" is right. It's like any art form.

I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships . . . and also a few enmities.

Art's too long and life's too short.