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.

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.

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

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

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.

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.