The 60s passed and faded and I grew older, and in 1987 bought a house in upstate New York, and it turned out that John Brown was buried down the road from my house and that he had lived there longer than anywhere else and his house was still standing.

What I am finding now is that my audience is getting younger as I get older, which is a very good thing as you know - you don't want them to get older as you get older.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Motivations are too tangled and complex.

So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.