If you cross-section anyone's life from one angle and then another, what constitutes goodness looks different each time. It's not an absolute.

I think it's very hard to be sexually explicit and erotic - though there are writers, like K. M. Soehnlein, who are just brilliant at this.

I love the way a story's ending can force you to read backwards. It's as if you are slowly adjusting a kaleidoscope until a random scattering of colored crystals suddenly falls into a beautiful symmetrical pattern.

Chekhov used to correspond with aspiring writers, and once he gave this advice to Maxim Gorky when he was encouraging him to pare his wordy sentences: "When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace." The short story, by definition, embodies this notion of grace, because it requires such forceful compression to achieve its effects.

I wanted to let form lead my thinking, and repetition always confronts you with the interesting problem of how to break out of a cycle that seems so deterministic, which was germane to the story's concerns.

When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive truths.

When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.