Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?

I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.