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

I think I've learned to be mindful. I may not have taken the time to try to understand narrative techniques, let's say, with any rigor, if I did not also have to try to explain those techniques to someone else.

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

Every person in therapy has a love disorder.

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.

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

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.