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

In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

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

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.

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

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.

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