The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.

Before I was reading science fiction I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

I wasn't looking for another marriage. I had been married before. He is a nice man - a geologist an Ernest Hemingway type. But Paul and I married because of convention.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation and he isn't yet historical.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain Earnest Hemingway Jack London Harriett Beecher Stowe Pearl Buck Charles Dickens Rudyard Kipling Alfred Lord Tennyson to name a few.