All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.

Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.

There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.