At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.

I found it instructive and highly constructive as a writer to go to a point of disaster and come out with a feel for it and then some sort of a lesson based on feeling.

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it.

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.