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.

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.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.

Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

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.