“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.”

“I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.”

“If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?”

“A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.”

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily--perhaps not possibly--chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”

“I suppose I've never set out to write a novel in which nothing happens . . . only to write a novel about the lives of certain characters. That nothing 'happens' in their lives is beside the point to me; I'm still interested in how they live, and think, and speak, and make some sense of their own experience. Incident (in novels and in life) is momentary, and temporary, but the memory of an incident, the story told about it, the meaning it takes on or loses over time, is lifelong and fluid, and that's what interests me and what I hope will prove interesting to readers. We're deluged with stories of things that have happened, events, circumstances, actions, etc. We need some stories that reveal how we think and feel and hope and dream. ”