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.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

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.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

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.

At its best, fiction is not a diversion but a means of knowing the world.