But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.

Writers when they're writing live in a spooky, clamorous silence, a state somewhat like the advanced stages of prayer but without prayer's calming benefits.

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.