A strong woman is a woman at work, cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn't mind crying, it opens the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up develops the stomach muscles, and she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.

I wasn't afraid of being poor; I rather took it for granted. I was good at getting by with very little. I couldn't imagine sacrificing my writing to anything else.

I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.

i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people

Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.

My strength and my weakness are twins in the same womb.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.