You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and r….

In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter..

Change itself is what fascinates me. I am drawn, as a moth to the flame, by edge situations, by situations of metamorphosis..

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write..

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience..

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, ….

We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, an….

It is my feeling that a story is not finished until it is read, and that the reader finishes it through his or her life experience, prejudices, world….

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place..

I wish I knew how to quit you..

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up..

I would rather be dead than not read.

No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble..

and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite….

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music..

I am influenced by words and the chewiness of language.

If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as thou….

I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in….

... there are four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman..

And I think that's important, to know how the water's gone over the dam before you start to describe it. It helps to have been over the dam yourself..

If you can't fix it, you have to stand it..