I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.