Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."

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

There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel—it’s that postmodern thing—it’s more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being’s experience.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.

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

I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.