I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.

You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.

There's definitely a feeling with a short story that it's pure story telling. You're not really worried about theme. You're not going to stay with the characters long enough to live your life with them. And you have different kinds of relationships with them.

If you give a writer a pile of blank paper and say you can write anything you like on any subject you want at any length you want, you will probably never get anything at all, whereas if you have 900 words to write, and it's fiction that is somehow op-ed fiction, and it needs to tie in with Halloween . . . okay, those are my constraints, that's where I now need to start building something.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.