Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take "Antigone" and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is an interesting one. When I was an undergraduate, there was a glib notion around that there was no reason to suppose a bad man could be a good writer.