Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."

I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.