There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

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.

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.

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 of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.