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

A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

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, whatever form it may take.

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

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 end, justified in singing it my way.

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 forms and genres.

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

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 like.

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

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

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

ISIS and these kinds of extremists are a death cult. We’re a life cult. Rock ’n’ roll is a life force, and it’s joy as an act of defiance.

Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it?

Life is like an ocean, jump right in.

I grew up in a culture of motorbikes. So I like racing just fine. Quite a lot, actually. That was when I was a boy in Australia. And I never really made the jump to cars after that.

Rock'n'roll will never go away completely because it's so fundamentally attractive.

My dad is kind of a rascal, like in a Dickensian sense. He just goes from career to career.

The way we look at it, everything is a sound.

The avarice of the old: it's absurd to increase one's luggage as one nears the journey's end.

The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who's been holding the whip for 800 years and who's been under it for 800 years.

Scheduling is always tough, no matter what the budget size is, and we had our own run-ins with that, on 'Fading of the Cries.'