I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

My dad and mom divorced when I was around ten, and I didn't live with him after that, though he was close by and we saw each other weekly. I wasn't really aware that he was a writer; I didn't start reading his writing until I was about fifteen. It occurred to me then that my dad was kind of special; he's still one of my favorite writers.

Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup... A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.

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

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.