Literature is not an instruction manual.

Everybody should customize their names.

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

Because it is the Midwest, no one really glitters because no one has to, it's more of a dull shine, like frequently used silverware.

Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, "Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

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