 Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing. |
| Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow. |
| 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. |
| Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else. |
| One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story. |
| 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. |
| Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order. |
| There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form. |
| I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| You don't teach information in a writing workshop. |
| 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. |
| Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community. |
