The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.