If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.
All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.
I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.
I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.