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.

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

Little children are all writers.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.

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

I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.