If a novel or a story works, you don't stop thinking about it; it doesn't truly end.

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?

I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around and think of most often - are the dark ones? Maybe we have to wander around in the darkness to understand it?

I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.

A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's true in a lot of cases, most long-term relationships compared to some of the briefer ones - the intensity of those brief ones that end, I think a short story is kind of like that. There's a certain level of intensity that I think is different.