It's easier to write about a place sometimes when you've left it, when you can apply your imagination to your memory and let your emotions guide the writing about a place.

I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

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.