I think of fear as a survival function, and in the stories that I write, the only thing that I've tried to do is provide people with nightmares which are really safe places to put those fears for a while because you can say afterwards that uh, that, that well it was all just make-believe anyway, so I just took my emotions for a walk.

Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that - while not perfect - is pretty spooky.

Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.

Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.

You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.

In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.