I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. Th...
If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our he...
I don't fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don't fool around with it.
My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.
He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.
There isn't enough of anythingas long as we live. But at intervalsa sweetness appears and, given a chanceprevails.
My heart is broken, she goes. It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.
There is no God, and conversation is a dying art.
Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back i...
A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.
Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.
Happiness. It comes onunexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,any early morning talk about it.
Your face, your mouth, your shoulderinconceivable to me now!Where did they go? It’s likeI dreamed them. The stones we broughthome from the beach lie face upon the windowsill, cooling.Come home. Do you...
All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want...
Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned i...
I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily,...
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
