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

The human heart is a dark forest.

Want! You must want something. What do you want?

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

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

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.

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