Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

Making reality real is art's responsibility.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

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.

Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.