When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, just like you’d took an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.

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've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.