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.

We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.

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.

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

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.

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

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