Most all of the writers I admired when I was in my teens and twenties died young. Fitzgerald lived the longest. He was 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. And then once you're approaching 40, you suddenly think, "Well, maybe I would like to live longer than Fitzgerald or Thomas."

Mine is not an autonomous imagination.

It's the cynics who never get married.

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.

Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.