For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.

My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.

I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.

Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

I had to get a second passport in a hurry.

[Students for a Democratic Society] it's a social democratic program.

I wanted to be cute. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.

Every place is safe to him who lives with justice.

I always think the audience sometimes wants what you're not giving them.

The moment a man ceases to progress, to grow higher, wider and deeper, then his life becomes stagnant.

We live in our own world , A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge.

Some people prefer eating dessert to the main course. These people have never been really hungry.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?