If my career continues along its current arc people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor even when they don't mean to.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

I've discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.

I think I wanted to write a book about the relationship between the victim and perpetrator in which the victim agrees to remain silent.

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry whether it's the writer or the spy.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it as an artist you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material and that's a creepy thing to do.

I like to write with people I have a relationship with otherwise it's kind of scary and you hold back because you don't want to pour your guts out to someone you never met.

I can see how a relationship with a writer would be an easy thing.

If one could be friendly with women what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.