When we test out our own insights on how other people might feel, the testing ground is ourselves. Our views on anything from politics to landscape a… - Hortense Calisher

I don’t think artists can compete—except as to money and prizes, and, of course, status. Which may be temporary. But not on the page. Or the canvas or the stone. Or the musical score. All you can hope to be is worthy of the company you respect.

But you are a feminist, aren’t you? HC: Born. But not orthodox. And the writer part comes first. I’d never write propaganda.

I couldn’t write those first stories about them until they were all dead. That’s when I began. (It was an unusual family.) Well, I’d paraphrase Tolstoy: All families are. All people too, probably; all places. That’s in part what sends me to writing stories—to balance out the usual and the unusual in the life I see.