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

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.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.