Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor.

A lot of people don't know what they want, you know, or they're just kind of vague about it.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.