I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.

People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

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

We write about what we don't know about what we know.

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.

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.