I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.