Uninvited criticism is insult.

Our salvation never comes in the form we would have chosen.

Sometimes, in that darkness, there is a single act of love, some selfless gesture, an aspiration, and we see that it's not been all waste, all hopeless, and we can ... well ... go on.

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A scream is not a discovery.

Let good people sin. Give virtue to rotters.

Nothing on earth in fiction is less interesting than characters under the influence of alcohol.

Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space.

Using language like jungle growth isn't the solution to telling a story.

There's something about a parenthesis in fiction that puts one off, saying, "It's me, moi, jumping in now."

What a strange thing it is to recognize a sound like the shriek of a wounded animal, when you've never heard the shriek of a wounded animal.

You only feel powerless because your fear has given your power to the object of your fear. Once you realise this, you can claim it back.

Life is simply beautiful and too short to shed tears for something which was never yours. It was time to move on.

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

A winter without snow seems depressing, lacking.

We only have our nervous system to paint.

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experiences. But if you have the same experiences as everyone else, you are unlikely to look in a different direction.

The phrase what I want struck me. It contains so much entitlement, so many complications, but encompasses only what a person doesn't have.

I live on a ranch that's larger than Manhattan. That's a weird circumstance.

Conscience is the reason employed about questions of right and wrong.