But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must t….

I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life..

My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I'm trying to cast the….

People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people bu….

I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air..

Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have t….

Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know.".

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book..

I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its….

I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw….

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, an….

I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of wo….

We are all living this dance and it is clearly fraught with making choices. Lots of my choices are bad and that's normal. None of us are attractive a….

For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy..

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment..

Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on ….

I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. Sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured wha….

What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writer….

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live..

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, th….

Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange elem….