I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery.

Basically for me a story can be anything. Anything you tell me, anything I read in the newspaper, in any mode. I don't have any restrictions.

Music is, by far, the best art. Nothing even comes close. It's so immediate and emotional. In writing, maybe ninety percent of it is the unconscious and ten percent is control. In music, I think it's probably more like ninety-nine percent the unconscious. It's just a beautiful thing happening through you. And so, too, is writing a great story.

I love satire. Evelyn Waugh is one of my favorite writers of all time. He's hilarious. He's so wicked. He's so great. On the other hand, pure satire is an imitation. It doesn't really have any heart. It only holds things up to ridicule.

They [my stories] evolve. If they're tightly constructed, it's because they're revised constantly as I move forward each day. That's where the structure inheres. It's all organic.

Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.

I have very rarely written autobiographical stuff. "Greasy Lake" and some other works have some autobiographical elements, as does "Birnam Wood," the one I chose to end [this collection] with. I lived in that house and some of my feelings are expressed in it, but it's not autobiography. It was not me and that didn't happen exactly that way.