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.

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

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

For me, the meaning of life is the next generation.

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

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.