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

I wrote poems and an essay about that weird language. We still remember it to a certain extent, and it still comes up when we're all together. It's so fundamental to how I think.

If all the students who slept through lectures were laid end to end, they'd all be a lot more comfortable. If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

Well, it's not all the same, but there are a lot of parallels. I'm not sure how to answer [on psychology background], but I think when I was studying psychology I had a professor and a friend who would talk about "process" all the time. Your process, his process, the group's process. There's some carryover from that discussion to my creative work.

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.

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.