Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.