You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

. . . 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.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

You know, most people really don't know me.

Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.

In a way he was lucky. He was a member of a generation that thought it
was a good, even joyous, political idea to put its brains, energy,
labor at the service of the people.