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

One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.

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.

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

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

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.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.