When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.

As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

Sometimes, walking with a friend, I forget the world.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.