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.

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.

Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

It wasn't that I wanted to be an artist. But when I took my first drawing class with the painter Doug Ohlson, I could never finish a drawing.

I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.

I'm interested in reality but I'm not interested in realism at all. I'm interested in the ways that I think people want to relate.