My characters tend to be people who are looking back on a life lived, their joys, their regrets..

I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done..

I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably ….

Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would b….

We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul..

I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good sometim….

Everybody, doesn't matter who you are, escapes time. And for me, nothing is stranger than the thought that kids are just kids. Nobody is just anythin….

I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out..

I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words..

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways..

John Colman Wood's The Names of Things is a thoughtful, patient, and ultimately rewarding book. It's about, among many other things, the connections ….

I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually st….

A stellar, fully-realized collection of stories... grounded, wonderfully, in the river valleys of western Maine. You come away not only understanding….

I think what I'm after, a lot of the time, is just honesty. What accounts for the fact that the stories we tell ourselves - the story we carry around….

A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's t….

My first book came out again - the re-issue from 2001. I was rereading it to make sure that I didn't miss any mistakes, and I didn't know who had wri….

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after..

I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she….

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades..

But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't ….

I have a friend who teaches yoga (or is it pilates?), and she said that I don't seem to live in the moment. And I said, "Exactly!" I'd go nuts if I l….