One good maxim to keep in mind, and I can't remember who said it, "You meet the same people on the way down that you meet on the way up, but you're going the other way."

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get? At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.