What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.

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

The people who make reality are angry peasants with old cannon shells wired together, an anti-vehicle device.

The best defense is a good story.

I'm an amateur, so I read what's interesting to me.

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.

Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.