The word career is a divisive word. It's a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.

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.

There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

A lot of sad things have happened to my friends' children, people you knew as babies. They've been killed or become crazy or all kinds of tragic things. There are some people whose children haven't talked to them in fifteen years. There's all kind of meshugaas in this world.

I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.