A joke is necessary at this time.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing 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.

The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don't live with a lover or roommate who doesn't respect your work. Don't lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don't 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.

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

I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.