I try to be accommodating, but I'm pretty much a loner.

Like when you have the right title for something you're writing and you get lost - you can always go back to the title and go, "Yeah, that's what this is about."

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

There are things I don't like, like sitting at the head of the class. It makes me uncomfortable. I'll do it in a seminar if I have to, but with a workshop, I try to put myself in the circle somewhere. Because that hopefully frees up some people by making somebody else sit at the nominal head of the table.

If I'm in LA, I'm close to home, and that just brings up all these other things, good and bad. There is a reason why I am not there. That's what I have to remind myself of. But I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe. I forget how beautiful and calm California is. It's not so much about the place, but also the age that I came to the place and, well, other things. New York is hard.

The other thing [my psychology professor] said to me was that I was always very mindful of the person who was away from the group, that I was always trying to bring them in.

I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.