My life is going to change. I feel it.

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.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

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

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

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