My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.