An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people like the Chekhov story The Lady With the Little Dog.

I’m not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don’t seek a wide swath of feedback.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

I always say to my students, if you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

We live in a funny time, a funny era, when desire, to be adult desire, has to be conceived as sexual. And that didn't used to be the case. Sexuality is a social construction as much as anything else and I think the realities of sexuality don't always fit into the social constructions that we have, and we live in a goal-oriented time - on all fronts.

Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.