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

... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.

You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.

Tall people have a real advantage in the world.

You are skilled. I exhort you.

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.