Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

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

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.

Place is character. And all writing is regional.

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.