Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive at all times. What is attractive to me is authenticity.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup... A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.

Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.