Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined drama that engaged me.

Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.