I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

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.

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

I know I've done good work. I've been very serious about my writing, and I've done the best that I could. But I don't feel that I've done more than I should have. In fact, I've done less than I should have.

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 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.