I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

To write you had to read so I backed into reading.

Some people want to be bank presidents. Other people want to rob banks.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.