It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

One hates a person for the same reason one loves him

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

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