The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities.

It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.

I'm just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.

You are skilled. I exhort you.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.

The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write.

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.