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.

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.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physicain should not be influenced by such judgements.

I do like to drive fast and I have gotten pulled over in the past. I use my skills to get out of tickets.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.

Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.