"I will take you, my audience, to a miraculous world, but to do this, you will need to agree to my terms, that the drama will be tied to sentences, that characters will be defined in words, and the wonders will exist in the traditional way, with short stories that muscle across the page."

"Fiction is the examination of the human heart as individual characters move through scenes that test—or perhaps change—their souls."

"America is a cinematic culture.  As a people, we are familiar with the conventions of film, perhaps more so than those of fiction."

"The art of fiction is, in large part, the art of small-scale illusions."