“Requiems for the Departed contains seventeen short stories, inspired by Irish mythology, from some of the finest contemporary writers in the business.”

“I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.”

“A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.”

“To cut a long story short, I'm a writer.”

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

“A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.”