The literary world is more time-traveling than the art world, and novelty is much more important in art than it is in writing.

Nothing is a matter of age. It's really in the person because you can publish book after book after book and still want that golden apple. And maybe it's the reality principle that has hit me. I believe that a career is very different from writing. My career is a certain kind of career.

You know how some people are upwardly mobile? I'm sort of downwardly mobile in the publishing world, because of my sales figures and also because of the kind of books I write. Everything really counts on sales. I started out with a bigger press, my first few books. But I've always done some things with independent and small presses and small magazines and I always will.

I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

I'm not interested in safety. A great risk in writing is imagining you have something to protect. Playing it safe to placate someone or something. People talk about compromise, but often people don't even know when they're compromising, because they're not conscious of contradictions.

Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.

I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write.