I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.

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.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.