Under the skin, intense fires burn.

But that's what we all are-just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we'd just fade away.

The thing I like so much about short stories is that there isn't as much of an investment of time so I'm free to experiment more. If it doesn't work out, I've only lost a week or two of work. If I screw up a novel I've lost at least a year's worth of work. But the nice thing is that those experiments with short stories can be carried over to novels when the experiments do work.

It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are

As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't.

You walk around with a negative attitude and you're just naturally going to bring trouble and hard times down on yourself.

Beauty isn't what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It's a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It's realizing the goodness of things, it's leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It's appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others.