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

It's hard to read real fiction. It takes time. It takes a sustained attention.

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.

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

I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.

The education of young people is narrowing. They cannot have the scope they used to have. They are being taught in high school by people earnest, still, but maybe less well-prepared than we would want them to be - but not because they are stupid or churlish.

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