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

The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytell….

I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a….

I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing ficti….

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….

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

Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image..

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….

As a practical matter, I like the dramatic monologue for its compelling intimacy. To be inside one's character, to register his or her every vagrant ….

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

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems..

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, ….

A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstopp….

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

I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Fi….

My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination w….

Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only ….

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 for….

The critique of social inequality, which is very much a part of my story, came about naturally from my recollection of Huck and Tom and the controver….

Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are,….

Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage..