There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.

What do any of us really know about love?

What good are insights? They only make things worse.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

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