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

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.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, and left the flushed print in a poppy there.

It would be great to go to school all year and do movies during the summer, but it doesn't work that way. I'm not Julia Roberts, so I have to be flexible.

Because I've been on the receiving end of infidelity, I know how much it hurts.

I am a great believer in having the power to end your life and knowing that, in extremis, you can. But I would not want to involve anybody else in my actions if it could imperil them.

You cannot have a relationship with someone you can't trust.

There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to 'Americanize' him.

I have never savored life with such gusto as I do now.

Today I will do one small task that will contribute toward the achievement of a life goal.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

We know we need civilization and laws and procedures, but isn't it frustrating? Wouldn't it be great if we could just do what we needed to do?

Communication the human connection is the key to personal and career success.

I don't have to be making a lot of money or living in a fancy house.

When I was 13, I entered the seminary in the hope of becoming a priest. But I often found myself helping the nuns in the kitchen and thus discovered my passion for cooking. I began to cultivate my skills and aspirations at the age of 15, when I embarked on my first apprenticeship.

If two people want to get married, it’s their prerogative. Everybody should be able to do what they want to do and be in the pursuit of happiness.

Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shore, nor could Time himself hurl down the mountains that guard it.

Don't set yourself on fire to keep others warm.

I go into the gym and do 75 pullups, 75 dips, 150 squats, 150 pushups, and then 20 minutes of ab work. Done. It takes an hour; I'm in and out. I sweat the whole time.

Bruce Springsteen really got any creative person's dream career, and his good-heartedness and good-spiritedness are part of it: both because it made the people behind the scenes want to do their jobs that much better, but it also means that he connects with an audience in a way that holds them close.