I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.

I lost my job and started painting houses with a friend. The marriage had ended about the same time the career did.

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.

What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of place.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.