It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

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