Sometimes People Surprise Us. People We Believe

Like Most People, I Can Be Very Easily Hurt.

I Think It's Very Important For Writers And Artists Generally To Be Witnesses To The World, And To Be Transparent. To Let Other People Speak... To Travel... To Experience The World. And Memorialize It.

The Act Of Sending A Letter Is An Act Of Generosity, Even If, In Retrospect, It Might Seem Reckless. Why Regret One's Generosity? Why Regret One's Impulsiveness, One's Misjudgment Of Others? The Inevitable Discovery That Someone Is Selling Letters You'd Written In Trust Is Simply To Discover An Obvious Human Truth: There Are Those Who Don't Cherish Us As We'd Cherished Them, And Had Wished To Be Cherished By Them.

We Are All Regionalists In Our Origins, However 'universal' Our Themes And Characters, And Without Our Cherished Hometowns And Childhood Landscapes To Nourish Us, We Would Be Like Plants Set In Shallow Soil. Our Souls Must Take Root - Almost Literally.

When People Say There Is Too Much Violence In My Books, What They Are Saying Is There Is Too Much Reality In Life.