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

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.

In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.

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

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 Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.

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.

Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects.

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 storytelling.

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 boxer's getting in close to his opponent.

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

Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

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 controversy surrounding [Mark] Twain's use of them and from my own passionate interest in civil rights, animal rights, and the right of Earth to survive humankind's reprehensible neglect of its stewardship.

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

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