I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.

First-book novelists and storywriters haven't yet failed and so it's easier to publish them - you can gamble on a success. Whereas someone who has written four books that are highly literary and demanding and require you as a reader. They may not be republished.

I get to meet writers, and I love writers.

You have to read history. You have to have a sense of history.

In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.

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

The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.