“But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it.”

“Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.”

“I made tiny newspapers of ant events, stamp-sized papers at first, then a bit bigger, too big for ants, it distressed me, but I couldn’t fit the stories otherwise and I wanted real stories, not just lines of something that looked like writing. Anyway, imagine how small an ant paper would really be. Even a stamp would have looked like a basketball court.I imagine political upheavals, plots and coups d e’tat, and I reported on them. I think I may have been reading a biography of Mary Queen of Scots at the time….Anyway, there was this short news day for the ants. I’d run out of political plots, or I was bored with them. So I got a glass of water and I created a flood. The ants scrambled for safety, swimming for their lives. I was kind of ashamed, but it made for good copy. I told myself I was bringing excitement into their usual humdrum. The next day, I dropped a rock on them. It was a meteorite from outer space. They gathered around it and ran up and over it; obviously they didn’t know what to do. It prompted three letters to the editor.”

“Baby, high school's over. High school's never over..”

“Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”

“The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind.”

“I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology.”