I have recently re-read much of Chekhov and it's a humbling experience. I don't even claim Chekhov as an influence because he influenced all of us. Like Shakespeare his writing shed the most perfect light - there's no striving in it, no personality. Well, of course, wouldn't I love to do that!

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for m…

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdote…

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times... you see a little bit of Astaire in everybody's dancing--a pause here, a…

What a creative genius - what an inventor... A guy like that, you just sit back and say, okay, I'll never get there!