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

Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.

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.

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

The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.

I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

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.