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Of course I thought I was Jo in Little Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin Eden I found a writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw myself as (I guess I was) a…

[...] In the stories I used to write the ending would be neither happy nor sad; you’d be driven to go back for clues, for gentle hints of her future; you’d be the soothsayer, the story, the crystal ball, no word out of place.

[...] That’s the feeling in the air as she stands and looks out over the water during what will become the last ten minutes of her life not only as a character but as a soul because she’s mine and my soul, and not only did I make her but she made me—she gets, standing there, that feeling you get in…

I used to write stories that had lakes, that had deep blue waters shelled by the sky; water mucky and full of disease; I wrote stories where people used to break down and cry unbidden, unprovoked, just because of the way a stone looked when it was wet, or the way the wind ruffled the grass; the peo…

I'm also wild about mountains, hence my joy living for twenty years in Switzerland and my keeping a base there now: to walk among the hills, just to walk, to look. Another difference perhaps from the democratic instincts of the United States is that I'm not a marine creature, a lover of the democra…