Bausch is a wonderful storyteller. He's a mature writer who has a lot of confidence in the quality of character. He doesn't need to hook you with a sneaky plot and zany characters.

John Cheever was the first writer I ever read who sort of had that similar sensation that, you know, life is nasty, miserable, brutish and short, but that occasionally, there's a certain river of light, a kind word, a telling gesture that sort of illuminates something.

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

I'm a craftsman type of teacher. I don't like the thematic type of teaching that takes place in a lot of colleges.

In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.