In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.

Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.