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.

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.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.

Our income are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and trip.

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

To believe in a just law of cause and effect, carrying with it a punishment or a reward, is to believe in righteousness.

I wish I knew at 14 not to put much thought into what other people my age said to me, cause we were all looking for the answers. So I wish I knew that other people really don't know any more than you do!

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

There are nuclear weapons in China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan. It wouldn't take much to send a couple of warheads off on this planet somewhere that would cause a lot of environmental damage, then if you have got someone who wants to retaliate you have real problems.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

You have to not listen to the nay sayers because there will be many and often they'll be much more qualified than you and cause you to sort of doubt yourself.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.

While some no other cause for life can give, but a dull habitude to live.

The intelligence investigation under the leadership of Senator Church, which I know has helped cause this investigation by you, points out that the agencies did not disclose certain facts to us and that certain plots were going on.

I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

You know, people want to honor me, and on the one hand I just don't want to be a poster child; but on the other, I want to do something classy and great - something where the residuals will go to the cause.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.

I think that feeling that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.

The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all.

If we are able to get inside the music and inhabit it convincingly enough, it will cause everyone to find each other in this new psychological space. And that's most exciting.