No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

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.

People say, "Why do you call your kids up, why do you worry like that?" And I say, "I was raised like that." My grandmother looked at my father with the same eyes when he was sixty and she was eighty-five.

Old age is another country, a place of strangeness, sometimes, and dislocation. There's a lot to be done in this country, and a great deal of pleasure there. There are friends, some of whom are sick and needful of you, as you will be of them someday. The world itself is very beautiful. It's a place where you have a lot to do. But you have to do it knowing that sometimes you will be afraid of this new country.

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.

I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn't live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends "got relief." That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way.