Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him

I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.