The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound up finishing and publishing later I started very early on, in my early 20's, In The Country Of Last Things and Moon Palace. Both of those books I worked a great deal on but never quite got a grip on either one.

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.