It's no accident that so far, I've lived on the top floor of three walk-up buildings in Brooklyn. A friend of mine once compared me to a cat, saying I like to climb up high and feel like I'm the queen of all I survey. I often felt like that when I was writing Mama's Girl - I needed somehow to find a place, a perch that was high enough so I could look at this incredibly painful history...and write about it. I was afraid of digging too deep, that somehow I could lose myself in all the hurt - like so much quicksand. So I would find high places to curl up in like a cat - the loft in my apartment, the roof of my brownstone, even the kitchen counter.

I'm one of the people who think best in the morning. I like to wake up ready to go, and to know that during that whole day the phone wouldn't ring, the doorbell wouldn't ring - even with good news - and that nobody would drop in... I don't care what the temperature is. I don't care where I am or what room I'm in. I'd just get up and get my coffee and an ordinary breakfast and go to work, And just have that whole day! And at the end of the day, about five or six o'clock, I'd stop for good that day. And I'd have a drink, a bourbon and water, watch the evening news...and then I could do anything I wanted to

I just discover a prayer for writers... It was written by Samuel Johnson on April 3, 1753, the day on which he signed a contract which required him to write the first complete dictionary of the English language. He was praying for himself. Anyway, this is the prayer: "O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labor, and in the whole task of my present state, that when I shall reader up, at the last day, an account of the talent committed to me, I may receive pardon, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen."

I surround myself with objects that carry with them a personal history - old books, bowls, boxes, splintering chairs and benches from imperial China. I imagine the people who once turning the pages or rubbed their palms on the surfaces while they were thinking - thinking what? And then I hear my pappy little dog. Bubba Zo is my distraction, my reminder to get up and go for a walk before he pees on the carpet. I now include a lot of dog metaphors in my writing.

A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under my type-writer table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man - they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go.

I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark - it must be dark - and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come... For me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular... Writers all devise ways to approach their place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It's not being the light, it's being there before it arrives.

Whether you're at your desk or not when a poem's under way, isn't three that constant eddy in your mind? If it's strong enough all sorts of random flotsam gets drawn into it, how selectively it's hopeless to decide at the time. I try to break off, get away from the page, into the kitchen for a spell of mixing and marinating which gives the words a chance to sort themselves out behind my back. But three's really no escape, except perhaps the third drink.

Getting started is partly stalling... But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time i forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.

Writing requires huge amounts of solitude. What I've done to soften the harshness of that choice is that I don't write all the time. I like to go out... I like to talk. I like to listen. I like to look and to watch. Maybe I have an Attention Surplus Disorder. The easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.

I work on what's important to me in the morning, for three hours. Usually, in the afternoon, I have what I call my "toy truck," a story that might develop or might not, but meanwhile it's fun to work on. I begin to pile up some pages, and eventually it'll get shifted over to the morning...

Working on a new idea is kind of like getting married. Then a new idea comes along and you think, "Man, I'd really like to go out with her. "But you can't. At least not until the old idea is finished. I don't take notes, I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamned thing.

I work on what's important to me in the morning, for three hours. Usually, in the afternoon, I have what I call my "toy truck," a story that might develop or might not, but meanwhile it's fun to work on. I begin to pile up some pages, and eventually it'll get shifted over to the morning...

Working on a new idea is kind of like getting married. Then a new idea comes along and you think, "Man, I'd really like to go out with her. "But you can't. At least not until the old idea is finished. I don't take notes, I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamned thing.