There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.

What some people interpret as brooding melancholy is serenity. I don't feel required to grasp all the time.

I'm interested in themes that endure from generation to generation.

At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices.

To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

There's a certain nostalgia and romance in a place you left.