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

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

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.

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

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

I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

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

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

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.

It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

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

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.

Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.

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.

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

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

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.

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

We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us.

You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.

There is no other who experiences your thoughts or your feelings.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Kinsey would identify himself with Galileo in moments of feelings of persecution.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

As an alcoholic, you have no appreciation for your wife or your children's feelings, but I'm making up for that now. I'm winning my children's trust back.

A lot of the stuff that I do with Betty is in the eyes. A lot of the feelings that I evoke with her are unspoken, so that's been fun to play with.

Isn't it strange that its easier to be gentle with the feelings of people we care less about than those of our children, whom we love so much?

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

A date once leaned in to kiss me, and he ended up kissing my cheek. He was a little offended, but I didn't want to kiss him just to not hurt his feelings.

Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

We have listened here to the delegates who have recalled the terrible human suffering, and the great material destruction of the late war in the Pacific. It is with feelings of sorrow that we recall the part played in that catastrophic human experience by the old Japan.

In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries.

Everything I do is blown out of proportion. It really hurts my feelings.

The story line was done in a way that's organic and was doled out very slowly in little bites. We think that's authentic for this character, that her feelings are very deeply buried or she never felt them.

I'd much rather be in a movie that people have really strong feelings about than one that makes a hundred million dollars but you can't remember because it's just like all the others.

The blues comes right back to a person's feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don't know nothing about the blues, please believe me.

Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.