Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

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.

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

I like books that don't give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.