Art's Too Long And Life's Too Short.

I Might Write Four Lines Or I Might Write Twenty. I Subtract And I Add Until I Really Hit Something I Want To Do. You Don't Always Whittle Down, Sometimes You Whittle Up.

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.

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.

There Isn't A Story Written That Isn't About Blood And Money. People And Their Relationship To Each Other Is The Blood, The Family. And How They Live, The Money Of It.

If You're Feminist, It Means That You've Noticed That Male Ownership Of The Direction Of Female Lives Has Been The Order Of The Day For A Few Thousand Years, And It Isn't Natural.