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

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

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.

Write from what you know into what you don't know.

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.

The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.