The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anyone in Humanities, probably.

My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.