My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

We cannot love something solely because it has been ignored. It must also be worthy of our attention.

Last year, when Zora was a freshman, sophomores had seemed altogether a different kind of human: so very definite in their tastes and opinions, in ther loves and ideas. Zora woke up this morning hopeful that a transformation of this kind might have visited her in the night, but, finding it hadn't, she did what girls generally do when they don't feel the part: she dressed it instead.

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.