If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

My pragmatic nature, my impatience, will most likely have me drunk on aged spirit by noon.

Make your paradise here on earth, your own little paradise

Here's to the men who lose! What though their work be e'er so nobly plann'd And watched with zealous care No glorious halo crowns their efforts grand - Contempt is Failure's share!

Who cares who comes out of the closet or not, so long as you're happy?

Troubleshooters?" Michael asked. "When there's trouble," I told him, "they shoot it.

Out of the formless the forms appear.

Good advice is like a proverb: the meaning depends on the interpretation.

The next microsecond, as the water erupted around me, I realized too late that I should've brought the entire Twenty-first Nome to help me.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer.

Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.