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.

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

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

I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.