“I use the time to finish reading Of Mice and Men, which turns out to be just as awful as I thought it would be. I hate stories with dead puppies. So depressing.”

“I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.”

“The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.”

“I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, Just as long as he finishes the book.”

“It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I’d written the story. I hadn’t—I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It’s in there somewhere—but I have to find it. I’ll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.”

“I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.”