No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.

The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.

your soul needs to be lonely so that its strangest elements can moil about, curl and growl and jump, fail and get triumphant, all inside you. Sociable people have the most trouble hearing their unconscious. They have trouble getting rid of clichés because clichés are sociable.

I don't engage in self-censorship. But I do change everybody to have red hair in the last draft. ... If you give people red hair when in real life they haven't got red hair, I've noticed they don't recognize themselves, anyway.

No one is shallow and vulgar forever; sooner or later the whole species likes to be profound.

The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.

For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.