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It's hard to say if actual places really affect the way you write.

I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.

Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

I'm not sure there are too many people who write what I write.

'Places to Go' is something that I would never normally write because I would usually be worried with what people would think about me.

People and places are the source of my work, both in prose and verse-and this remark is not the truism it seems, for I do not distinguish as sharply between a place and a person as most people seem to do.

I suppose more than anything, it's the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.

I tend to write more when I travel.