I try not to read my own books just because I would rather read somebody else.

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 that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.

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

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

I think some writers should wait for something to say.