What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone — in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

Getting even is one reason for writing.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

I cannot walk under the wires. The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection.