I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.