Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

You think that what I've told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards [National Book Award] are always subjective.

Everybody should customize their names.

Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.