My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.

What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you.

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

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.

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.

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

When readers don't like the book, it's usually because they feel that romantic love is pass or somehow needs more irony.