I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

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.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.