But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

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

But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.

I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.

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

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

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