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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The human heart is a dark forest.