I wanted to let form lead my thinking, and repetition always confronts you with the interesting problem of how to break out of a cycle that seems so ….

I have to trick myself into writing a story - impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that ….

I've always hated quotation marks: they're ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another..

I don't think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does..

When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive trut….

What I've found as I have kept writing stories is that more and more your way is barred. I feel really choked by what I already know how to do, by th….

For me, what's compelling about sexuality is the way that desire transforms what we take in through our senses, the ways in which our bodies betray u….

When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differ….

I think it's very hard to be sexually explicit and erotic - though there are writers, like K. M. Soehnlein, who are just brilliant at this..

You don't really have a story until you discover the moment when the pressures on a character force a sudden, abrupt shift in direction and she falls….

It's hard to write sex because it's hard to write desire, period..

My Irish Catholic mother loved romantic movies, provided they ended with a kiss before the screen went dark. If things went any further than that, sh….

I love the way a story's ending can force you to read backwards. It's as if you are slowly adjusting a kaleidoscope until a random scattering of colo….

You have to be able to play: this is spontaneous interaction, and it flexes all the creative muscles you need as a writer. And empathy is one of thos….

If you cross-section anyone's life from one angle and then another, what constitutes goodness looks different each time. It's not an absolute..

Chekhov used to correspond with aspiring writers, and once he gave this advice to Maxim Gorky when he was encouraging him to pare his wordy sentences….