Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.

I'm sad that there no more mysterious places in the world.

Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive.

The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.

A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.

We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book of poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information?

All writers are egomaniacal, manic-depressive, drug-addicted alcoholics. You want to have that fix again.