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.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

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.

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

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."

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.