I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

I once read that you die because you see the Angel of Death, and you fall in love. And you fall in love so hard your soul is sucked out through your eyes, and that's the moment of death. It's a lovely, strange old Jewish legend.

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?

There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.