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

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

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

It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

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.

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.