I think we validate our lives through our actions.

I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.

I think that if you use something from you life in fiction, it metamorphosizes into something strange and different. Afterward it is hard to tell what actually was part of your life and what is part of the story of the fictional character.

I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.

One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally.