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

Conversation on the page should reflect what the story is about. It doesn't have to be "realistic" in the sense that it's something you heard and plugged into a story.

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.

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

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

I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.

Obviously the Internet makes everything easier - you get people's addresses and so on and everything seems much more accessible.