I don't know what makes a writer's voice. It's dozens of things. There are people who write who don't have it. They're tone-deaf, even though they're very fluent. It's an ability, like anything else, being a doctor or a veterinarian, or a musician.

And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.

When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.

My father brought me a box of books once when I was about three and a half or four. I remember the carton they were in and the covers with illustrations by Newell C. Wyeth.

I've always known a lot of very bad people, destructive, brutes of a certain kind. Then I've seen these lovely impulses and what not, and they've stayed with me and comforted me.

I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.