Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

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.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

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.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

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.