I always want to read Gore Vidal's nonfiction. Because everything he writes is an essay and it's worth reading.
The importance to the world of what we scribblers write is in doubt, I would think.
History is beautiful stories or scary stories, yeah.
There is a lack of context in contemporary education. And contemporary consideration - because we live in those interiorities so much. Especially young kids who live by surfing the Web.
I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.
I can't imagine having the courage to ask a publisher to do a whole book of my poems.
I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.
I get to meet writers, and I love writers.
I love baseball. What I love about baseball is that you are always waiting.
Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?"
In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.
You have to read history. You have to have a sense of history.
I'm an amateur, so I read what's interesting to me.
What I try to do is read stuff that won't deal with the dangerous dark things I hope I am writing about.
When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.
My heroes are people like Philip Levine, who is simply like a god to me, as a writer. And he is a very good man, too.
I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.
I love thrillers. I would even read certain science fiction, although I haven't been a devotee for many years.
Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.
I always write the best that I can. And I won't publish it until I have done it right.
I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.
