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...

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

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.

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...

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.