You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.

Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.

As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.

Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.