When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

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.

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

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

In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.

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.