If a story is in you, it has to come out.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.