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.

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.

I know important literary writers who can't get published.

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

Let's look at what the books are that are being produced. More and more they are being made like movies. To sell. They are being tested out.

I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems.

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