What's truly important--and what I find myself forgetting and having to relearn--is that right here, right now, I am free. Free to be myself and to express myself.
I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool. '