When blame has been assigned, the story is over.

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

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

What a midwesterner he was, a thoroughly unhip guy with his heart in the usual place, on the sleeve, in plain sight.

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

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