When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.