I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.