I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.

Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it, thanks. I'll eat it here.

When you are writing a character, what the character says is obviously crucial. But what the character doesn't say is absolutely as important as his words.

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

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.

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

I always had good students.