If a writer is honest, if what is at stake for him can seem to matter to his readers, then his work may be read. But a writer will work anyway, as I do, and as I have, in part to explore this terra incognita, this dangerous ground I seem to need to risk.

I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world, the culture we are in, to art right now.

We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.

I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.

When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.

If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.

If a writer is honest, if what is at stake for him can seem to matter to his readers, then his work may be read. But a writer will work anyway, as I do, and as I have, in part to explore this terra incognita, this dangerous ground I seem to need to risk.