A friend of mine, a poet, Rebecca Wolff recently said to me, "You know, your stories are really voice-driven," and I guess I knew that already, but it's so true that I can't get something going unless I can hear the voice.

I don't know what a natural thought process is.

I am interested in people, and I am interested enough in people that I want to be friends with a lot of people and know about their lives. So I'm not a hermit. I'm also interested in writing about other things. It goes on and on. I sometimes wish that I had a different personality. But then I would write different types of books.

I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

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.

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.

The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.