I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.

Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.

The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.