I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Sometimes you find that what is most personal is also what connects you most strongly with others.

I'm really sorry for people growing up right now, because they have some cockeyed idea that they can get by with their eyes closed; the cane they're tapping is money, and that won't take them in the right direction.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

We write about what we don't know about what we know.

You know the mind is an astonishing, long-living, erotic thing.

I didn't intend to become a short-story writer. I became one because I finished a couple of short stories and realized that's what I wanted to do and could do with children and with all the other things in my life.