What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

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

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.

I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.

I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.