Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.

Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.

I don't have the courage not to write all the time.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.

Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.