It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.