What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

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.

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 agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out.

We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

Actually, you’re not famous at all. Maybe you’ll get some traction after you’re dead?

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