Then she smiled, and in that instant, if such a thing were possible, Pasquale fell in love, and he would remain in love for the rest of his life--not so much with the woman, whom he didn't even know, but with the moment.

He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

What business does memory have with time?

I come from a newspaper background, so maybe Im attuned to current events.

You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.

I realized the structure in a collection is how they're put together. Structuring the collection became the art of it for me. Because the stories had all been written.