I think some people see those three numbers 9/ 11 and they walk away. That might be changing now. People are more willing to step into an artistic exploration of that subject. All you can do is let it go

For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.

Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak's Broadway to Chicago.

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

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

I think the writer's job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.