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.

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.

Want! You must want something. What do you want?

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.

I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.

There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.