I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.