I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.