Norman Lock quotes:

I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.

Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects.

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

As a practical matter, I like the dramatic monologue for its compelling intimacy. To be inside one's character, to register his or her every vagrant thought, emotion, and response - the first-person viewpoint grants this privilege and immediacy.

Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.

I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

Metaphysics notwithstanding, I also insert myself in my fictions for no loftier purpose than to give me pleasure: to see myself performing onstage.

The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling.

Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.

Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.

For me, fiction's great gift - to writer and reader, alike - is freedom.

I do believe we are actors in our own dramas, which, moment by moment, we ourselves write; that we are characters in our own fictions or those devised for us by someone or something else.

I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.

I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a boxer's getting in close to his opponent.

I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.

It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.

My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination were answerable to me. If I wished for a man to levitate; to enter another's story by rowboat or by intoning a sentence or by performing a shadow-puppet play; if I wanted him to become a swarm of intelligent elementary particles and enter the Internet and travel into the past and far into the future, it was so.

The critique of social inequality, which is very much a part of my story, came about naturally from my recollection of Huck and Tom and the controversy surrounding [Mark] Twain's use of them and from my own passionate interest in civil rights, animal rights, and the right of Earth to survive humankind's reprehensible neglect of its stewardship.

My fondness for extended monologue might have been encouraged by two decades of writing stage and radio dramas.