Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.

It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.

All writers - all people - have their stores of private and family legends which lie like a collection of half-forgotten, often violent toys on the floor of memory.

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.