“For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.”

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

“My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into pieces.”

“To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead.”

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

“As I move along the line, other food items are plunked onto my tray: a small salad of iceberg lettuce and bacos, a slice of white bread with a pat of Hotel Holiday butter and blob of red Jell-O with fruit cocktail trapped inside. Instantly, I feel compassion for the trapped fruit.”