For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave...

Both reading and writing are experiences–lifelong– in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of...

Human life is fiction’s only theme.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what...

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the...

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of...

The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.

We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all...

Henry James said there isn’t any difference between “the English novel” and “the American novel” since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know...