Choose your agent as carefully as you would choose your accountant or lawyer. Or dentist.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

First of all it's usually women who run these higher primate sanctuaries, rarely men. They are white. They come from privileged backgrounds. They are educated.

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.