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.

A lot of sad things have happened to my friends' children, people you knew as babies. They've been killed or become crazy or all kinds of tragic things. There are some people whose children haven't talked to them in fifteen years. There's all kind of meshugaas in this world.

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 didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar.

Most of the Womens Libbers I knew really didnt want to have a piece of the mens pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didnt even want a slice of.

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.