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

What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.

Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"

My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.

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

Hollywood is the model for publishing, more and more. Not just blockbusters either.