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

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.

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.

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

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.

Never cry for the same reason twice.

Just as evil communication and company corrupts good manners, good communication and company can correct bad manners

One of the most remarkable contributions of humans to the world is our capacity for ideas.

Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, yet you will find nothing anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here.

In life, there are no perfect affections.

I'm proud of my brother. I would never not want to be associated with him.

There was no telling what people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted to.

Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.

That is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.