Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

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

I know I learn a lot from the students in my class and I'm not just saying that to sound like some generous teacher.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

As a young victim of bullying and then, later, a vindictive perpetrator of violence myself, I've known both sides of this experience, and I tried very hard in the writing here to be as absolutely honest as I possibly could, to not romanticize myself or my past actions or cowardly inactions in any way.

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.

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