Human life is fiction's only theme.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.