When I teach, I try to assign writers from whom I can learn.

Susan Rebecca White has a keen sense for how her characters talk and think. An impressive debut.

Of course I'd sometimes have characters from downstate living upstate, but it took a while for me to start writing about where I grew up.

I'll write about California someday, I imagine, but I don't know when.

I think it's probably better to make a region your own, and then maybe you can go somewhere else, but a lot of great writers have stuck to one region.

I believe that we can access stories, and voices from those around us, more easily often than from our own imperfect memories.

I think narrators expect a high level of intimacy with their readers, and vice versa.

I tend to listen to my friends and family empathetically, and I try to help work through their problems from the inside. I try to adopt their thinking.

I think the voice can carry a story.

I'm always relearning things I thought I'd learned for good a while back.

I'm suspicious of epiphanies, because they so rarely last.

I do not care if nobody resembles me.

The way it feels to me, ' he said, 'is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.

Free men stick their necks out.

We have found that marriage should be made up of two forgivers. We need to learn to say, "I was wrong, I'm sorry." And we also need to say, "That's all right, I love you."

The future belongs to the competent

Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.

Power, in whatever hands, is rarely guilty of too strict limitations on itself.

As your enemies and your friends, so are you

The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.

If you have a question, then find the answer.