When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.

I have a great interest in a number of things, perhaps too many. I admire people who seem to concentrate on only one fixed discipline to the exclusion of almost everything else.

A lot of professional dancers become professional when they turn 15 or 16 years old, when they're still children. So you've trained every single waking moment up until that point for a career that could maybe only last 10 years, maybe longer if your body holds up, if your injuries are kept at bay.

If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.

I don't use my writing career as a vehicle to get me acting work or to write roles for myself.

We're a very active family, and I like everything in its place. I'm all about designing every little space. It will help me in the business of being a mom. Every single day is so crazy with my work that I just need to be able to come home and do that business as efficiently as I try to do my professional work.