I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that "reader" is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

I try to keep my artistic opinions not so much "to myself" but "on myself."

Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.