I’m a heart surgeon, sure, but I’m just a mechanic. I go in and I fuck around and I fix things. Shit.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the...

She serves me a piece of it a few minutesout of the oven. A little steam risesfrom the slits on top. Sugar and spice -cinnamon – burned into the crust.But she’s wearing these dark glassesin...

Late FragmentAnd did you get whatyou wanted from this life, even so?I did.And what did you want?To call myself beloved, to feel myselfbeloved on the earth.

You see, this happened a few months ago, but it’s still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we...

V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.’ Notice the ‘glimpse’ part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something...

They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else–the cold, and where he’d go in it–was outside, for a while anyway.

Honey, no offense, but sometimes I think I could shoot you and watch you kick.

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

I’m always learning something. Learning never ends.

I’ve crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I’ve come to a place I never thought I’d have to come to. And I don’t know how I got here. It’s a strange...

no, va tutto bene. Era molto vecchia, e poi lui l’ha amata tutta la vita

That’s right,’ Mel said. ‘Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.’Same things we fight over these...

There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What...

But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window–maybe rearrange all the furniture.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

I’m moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.

there isn’t enough of anythingas long as we live. But at intervalsa sweetness appears and, given a chanceprevails.

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

HappinessSo early it’s still almost dark out.I’m near the window with coffee,and the usual early morning stuffthat passes for thought.When I see the boy and his friendwalking up the roadto deliver the newspaper.They wear caps...

If we’re lucky, writer and reader alike, we’ll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we’ll ponder what we’ve just written or read;...

Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.

Happiness. It comes onunexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,any early morning talk about it.

We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled up our lives and we were getting ready for a shake-up.

This is awful. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to anyone else in the world.

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it’d really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.

And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us–excuse me for saying this–but if something happened to one of...

It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things– a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone,...

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a...

But dying is for the sweetest ones. And he remembers sweetness, when life was sweet, and sweetly he was given that other lifetime.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.