“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”

“The writer, without softening his vision, is obliged to capture or conjure readers. And this means any kind of reader. It means whatever is there. I used to think that it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend the universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in the Yale Review, if they are any good at all you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary, or the state in sane asylum, or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs. And his need of course is to be lifted up. There is something in us as story-tellers, and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance of restoration. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but he has forgotten the cost of it. His sense of evil is deluded or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. He has forgotten the price of truth, even in fiction.”

“I love you," my mom says.I love you," my dad says.And all I say back is, "I love you."Because there isn't a fancy-or better- way of saying that.”

“I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.”

“Remember what I told you. If they hated me, they will hate you.”

“A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don’t have a gift for telling a story.”

“If the good news from cyberspace is that we're writing more, the bad news is that most of us aren't very good at it. Our words don't do justice to our ideas.”