When you write an essay, of course you're going to get pushback, but you're going to be allowed to make your case at leisure. You're going to be allowed to take into account possible objections and to fully humanize your reader. That feels to me like a much more sane thing to do.

As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

My idea about collections is that you write as hard as you can for some period and what you're really doing during that time is hyper-focusing on the individual pieces - trying to make each one sit up and really do some surprising work.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.

Nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that's going on now in America, that it's always been chaos - people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It's the scale that's amazing, and also the proximity to our own time.

In my case, when I am trying to be "kind" I often default in a sort of toothless loving-all stance that is, actually, not kind, because it is not truthful.