I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.

Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, it's self-consciousness.

The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've had a lot of glamour come my way in the last 10 years - you know, movie stars and mansions and red carpets and trips to Europe and crazy stuff I never would have imagined - and I look at them as if I'm the bartender in the corner of the room. They've never gone into my psyche. I look at them with distance, and wonder.