"There is a lot of fear embedded in some of these stories. Men and women fear spending their lives alone, but also fear the possibility of spending their lives with one another. Often there is potential for companionship within reach, but the character, burdened with the baggage of insecurity, isn't capable of overcoming her fear of closeness."
She lies as she lies in bed sometimes. "It's good, my flat chest," she says sometimes, "I can sleep on my stomach." Sometimes she will sleep on her stomach and her hair will pool around her head just that way. Sometimes it will do just that. And I have seen that.
Lilly did appreciate facts. She appreciated that the sun was 93 million miles from the earth, that the Empire State Building was 1,250 feet tall, that the human brain weighed three pounds, that E=mc2. She did not appreciate the fact that her mother had decided to kill herself because Lilly was unable to conceive a child.
"No editor or publisher ever wakes up in the morning, looks out his window, and scans the landscape for a brilliant writer who's just too shy to put himself or herself forward. It's a put yourself forward business, at every level."
"I went to the State University of New York at Binghamton and studied with the poet Milton Kessler. He gave me the best advice about my poems. He'd point to something in a poem that he thought was successful and he'd say, 'See that?' 'Yes,' I'd say. 'Well,' he'd say, '"do that again.'"
"All through college, I wrote for the school paper and even edited a humor magazine, for a while emulating a then-popular humor writer named Max Shulman. Junior year, with trepidation, I signed up for a creative writing course, which started my life of fiction despite the disasters of those early stories."