Under The Skin, Intense Fires Burn.

We're All Made Of Stories. When They Finally Put Us Underground, The Stories Are What Will Go On. Not Forever, Perhaps, But For A Time. It's A Kind Of Immortality, I Suppose, Bounded By Limits, It's True, But Then So's Everything.

The Thing I Like So Much About Short Stories Is That There Isn't As Much Of An Investment Of Time So I'm Free To Experiment More. If It Doesn't Work Out, I've Only Lost A Week Or Two Of Work. If I Screw Up A Novel I've Lost At Least A Year's Worth Of Work. But The Nice Thing Is That Those Experiments With Short Stories Can Be Carried Over To Novels When The Experiments Do Work.

Fairy Tales And Mythology Have Always Been An Exaggerated Distillation Of The Real World. Think Of Them As Blueprints For How To Deal With A Multitude Of Situations That Can Arise In A Person's Life. The Beauty Of Them Is That Their Analogies Resonate So Deeply And They Also Entertain While They Teach.

I Find The Characters In My Head And The More I Write About Them, The Better I Get To Know Them.

From The First Time He'd Met Her, He'd Sensed An Air Of Contradiction About Her. She Was Very Much A Woman, But Still Retained A Waiflike Quality. She Could Be Brash, And At Times Deliberately Suggestive, Yet She Was Painfully Shy. She Was Incredibly Easy To Get Along With, Yet She Had Few Friends. She Was A Talented Artist In Her Own Right, But So Self-conscious About Her Work That She Rarely Completed A Piece And Preferred To Work With Other People's Art And Ideas.