I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

In high school I read [Lev] Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and loved it. Then I read [Friedrich] Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" and that hit me hard. I don't know where I got it. My parents warned me not to mention either of those books when I went for my college interviews so I wouldn't seem like an egghead. They told me to talk about sports.

No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.