Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.