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

When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.

I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.

Even murderers, I suppose, experience the loss of car keys the way the rest of us do. I mean, how can they not? Once you make this person scramble around the house looking for her car keys and finally find them, get in the car, and run into traffic, we can identify with her enough that when she stops the car and pulls the gun out of her purse and heads in to kill somebody, we'll be with her as much as is possible.

Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.

For some people, it's very easy to be spontaneous and they can pour out the most wonderful stuff. But it's really hard to exert control over it, to think, 'Well, this could be different. This could go in the opposite order, there could be more here and less there.' For other people, it's much easier to have rules and a methodology, but much harder to let loose and allow their feelings to come pouring out on the page. They're more shy or they're just more distant from their emotions. I think everybody starts with one or the other.