My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

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

I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life.

I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.