The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.

The human heart is a dark forest.

You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.