That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.

Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.