I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.

Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.

We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.