"Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quit…"

"There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do yo…"

"“Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead. You’ve killed something, jus…"

"A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don’t matter a damn anymore."

"“My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that…"

"Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking.…"

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precis…"

"Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and tak…"

"John Gardner would take one of my early efforts at a story and go over it with me. I remember him as being very patie…"

"I don't know how Gardner might have been with other students when it came time to have conferences with them about th…"