The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

Even the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.

There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

I heard Zen teacher one time talking about abortion, and he was saying the way that abortion makes bad karma is any time the person involved pretends that there's not a cost to the choice, one way or the other; whether you get it or don't get it, there's a cost. That's just basic responsibility, to admit that there's a cost. And the bad karma is when you pretend that the thing is free.

I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.