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

It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I say to her.

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.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.