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.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

We are made to persist. that's how we find out who we are.

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

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.

I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now.

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