What moves me most is style, the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

My original favorite fictional hero was Heathcliff in Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” (I also loved the character of Dalva, who I created.) My favorite antihero is Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed.” There are lots of villains in “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” by Khaled Hosseini.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

As a child I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Early on in our childhood, our parents bought us the 12-volume set called “My Book House,” which had a great influence on me. I spoke with Robert Duncan about “My Book House,” who also read them early on, to his delight.

Youthful reading can be a melancholy procedure. Your credibility is so forlorn you believe everything you read. Later the feeling became quite humorous. “The little cripple boy drew on his cowboy boot. Unfortunately, there was a small rattlesnake in the boot, which bit and slowly killed him. His dog tried to revive him and the snake fatally bit the dog on the nose. Now there were two friends slumped in death on the porch.” That sort of thing. Otherwise my faithful reading boyhood was quite pleasant, although I lost my left eye at the age of 7, when a little girl shoved a beaker in my face. This only led to harder work finding alternative realities in books. At age 21, my favorite people, my father and sister, died in an auto accident. This served to fuel me to write totally without compromise. If people you love can die in an accident, you refuse to step back from your work.

What book that you read for school had the greatest impact on you?

I remember in the seventh grade I did a project where I had to read all of Willa Cather’s books, which were wonderful.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

The King James Version of the Bible. Also the works of Dostoyevsky. I read the Bible over and over in my youth, and the Judeo-Christian sensibility focused the world for me, for better or worse. Now, at my advanced age, I wonder how we are taught to believe something, but then we fail to learn how not to believe it. I find that I still believe in the Resurrection, though I improved it somewhat in a poem:

In the forty days in the wilderness Jesus

took along a stray dog from town. When

they got back home Jesus told the dog he

had to go off to Jerusalem to get crucified.

Jesus stored the dog in his tomb and after

he himself was brought there they

ascended into heaven together.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

The works of Dostoyevsky, to enrich his nature.