I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

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.

I loved the comradeship of the sixties and the seventies, and I still maintain friendships with the people I worked with then - the ones that are still alive. That's one of the great gifts of our political movements, great friendships . . . and also a few enmities.

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

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.

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.