Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.

It's a complex thing when you're writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious. I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance - and I come by this naturally, or I think I do - I am a very good judge of character.

I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Words were different when they lived inside of you.