A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

She serves me a piece of it a few minutes out of the oven. A little steam rises from the slits on top. Sugar and spice - cinnamon - burned into the crust. But she's wearing these dark glasses in the kitchen at ten o'clock in the morning - everything nice - as she watches me break off a piece, bring it to my mouth, and blow on it. My daughter's kitchen, in winter. I fork the pie in and tell myself to stay out of it. She says she loves him. No way could it be worse.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

I guess my writing has changed as my life has.