“Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s sort of like a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and misery by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it. But that only seems to happen after I’ve said, No, this isn’t going to work, forget it.”
“I like the idea of poetry, but you know, when you write prose, I think you have to be careful not to make it consciously poetic. It’s got to have some sharpness to it, and that’s the way I like to write now. I like to write in a way that, I don’t know, maybe that will frighten people a bit?”
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