If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person - you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.

Whatever you love, that will be an influence. It just will. So in effect the young writer's job is: go out and find some stuff to love.

In a story, for example, you'll start off with a character who is a little bit of a cartoon. That's not satisfying and you start revising. And as you revise you always are making it better by being specific and by observing more closely, which actually is really the same as saying you love your characters. The close observation equals love of them.

I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.

If you really think back to the great writers, there's a lot of happiness in Tolstoy; there's a lot of love, there's childbirth, and there's dances. And likewise in Shakespeare and even Cervantes, there's a lot of celebrations of the positive manifestations of life. Technically, I found it harder to do, so that's kind of a good late-life challenge - without getting sentimental or chirpy.

Positive human action is not only possible, but pervasive; human beings can improve and choose light and so on. And this is all happening.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.