Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.

For many years I didn't have health insurance.

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.