As for motivation, I'd say it's a combo of 50s Puritan work ethic and finish-it-itis -- I hate not finishing things.

It’s a long journey, you know. I really believe in the work of the unconscious. You have an idea, you think about it. You dream about it. But, for me, it’s my way of working, it depends on writing of course. I don’t need to go every day in front of my computer and write something. It’s always a surprise. In the moment, it’s a necessity. You need to write, so you write a thing.

Once in a while it vanishes—in the sense that I become deaf to beauty for a week or two or three. This coming and going of the inner life—because this is what it is—is a curse and a blessing. ... A blessing because it brings about a movement, an energy which, when it peaks, creates a poem. Or a moment of happiness.

Well, you’re right, I think the hard work definitely paid off. My grandmother drove me three hours to dance and three hours back from age six to age 11. I would do my school work in the car on the way there and then get home at like 11 o’clock at night, five days a week for many years. My training was seriously intense, and nothing came easy. I worked for everything I’ve ever been given.

I was going to be a journalist. But after the war I studied anthropology, just in order to become educated. I thought it was worth knowing the science of man. I still intended to become a journalist, but there were no jobs, because the reporters who had gone to war were coming back and were entitled to their jobs, and the women who had replaced them were damned if they’d leave, and they shouldn’t have left.

Fine, thank you. I am quite recovered. It was almost a near-death experience. Things weren't going so well for a little while, but I feel strong again.

I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

No. Well, I don’t know. It’s biochemical to be redistributed, certainly.

Bad things happening to my children and grandchildren.

Yes, well, that’s the reason that I don’t want to be in New York any longer. I don’t want to go to parties any more. There are no familiar faces anymore. You know, you go to a party and you hone in on the couple people you know. There are none of those people for me at parties any more. I’ve lost my sister, my brother, my editor, my publisher. It’s a whole generation gone by. Old war buddies of mine, my colleagues, my family.