Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

In the park I met other women and I started to get interested in their lives. I developed a lot of pressure to talk about women's lives, and children's lives, too. Children interest me tremendously.

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.

No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.

I don't have any degrees. I went to Hunter College one year and New York University another year. It's just on the basis of my books that I've been hired at any of the places I've been.

I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.