Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

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

Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.

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

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.