Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.

I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's made me mellower. I began to have a different perspective, because I may not be around much longer to be hassled by life's pressures.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.