Well, You Have Children So You Know:

When I Was About Twenty-one, I Published A Few Poems. Maybe I Wrote A Couple Of Stories Before, But I Really Began To Write Stories In My Mid-thirties. My Kids Were Still Little, And They Were In School And Day Care, And I Had Begun To Think A Lot About Wanting To Tell Some Stories And Not Being Able To Do It In Poetry.

I Was A Fantastic Student Until Ten, And Then My Mind Began To Wander.

But What's A Writer For? The Whole Point Is To Put Yourself Into Other Lives, Other Heads-writers Have Always Done That. If You Screw Up, So Someone Will Tell You, That's All.

I Believe In A Kind Of Fidelity To Your Own Early Ideas; It's A Kind Of Antagonism In Me To Prevailing Fads.

I Don't Have Any Degrees. I Went To Hunter College One Year And New York University Another Year. It's Just On The Basis Of My Books That I've Been Hired At Any Of The Places I've Been.