Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.