Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

Alone, she took hot baths and sat exhausted in the steaming water, wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the pressure of her extreme weariness ... one day in January she drew a razor blade lightly across the inside of her arm, near the elbow, to see what would happen.

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.