Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.

As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.