I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms.

Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way...Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.

The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again