Heights. I love being high, but I don’t like being up high.

Not trying something I really want to do.

I don’t think I have one in particular. I am pretty calm. Just some small things that I better not comment on :-).

To overcook that plate of fettuccine.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

As I got up in my 70s, stories began coming to me more and more rarely. I finished the novel Lavinia at 78. I no longer have the stamina to undertake a new novel, even if I wanted to. So, here I am, an old writer who loves writing – what have I got left to do?

That's it. Mostly. Really, the people and the issues all come together in a sort of clump or knot, and writing the story is untying, unwinding the knot.

As many times as necessary. With one story or novel, this may be five false starts and six or eight or ten full rewrites, beginning to end. With the next, it may mean just going back through it and over it fiddling details until I think it’s as good as I can get it.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin—the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin’s thinking. And he felt it, too.