I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.

I write about life as it exists within houses and on the streets. And there's nothing, hopefully, in any of my characterizations or in any of my plottings or in any of my valuations that doesn't ring true to life. I'm a novelist. I'm not a theoretician.

The problem with American democracy is the American corporation, which is a slave holder construct, pure and simple. It's totally invasive, and people are as tightly controlled within the walls of a corporation as they are in a totalitarian society.

I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.

I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.