The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

You see, this happened a few months ago, but it’s still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.

He seemed full of some goodness she didn’t understand.

I knocked stuff out of the medicine cabinet. Things rolled into the sink. ‘Where’s the aspirin?’ I said. I knocked down more things. I didn’t care. ‘Goddamn it,’ I said. Things kept falling.

It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

He left through the patio door. He was not certain, but he thought he had proved something. He hoped he had made something clear. The thing was, they had to have a serious talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things that had to be discussed. They’d talk again. Maybe after the holidays were over and things got back to normal. He’d tell her the goddamn ashtray was a goddamn dish, for example.

You sound like a nice man,” the woman said. “Do I? Well, that’s nice of you to say.” He knew he should hang up now, but it was good to hear a voice, even his own, in the quiet room.

But I guess even the knights were vessels to someone. Isn’t that the way it worked? But then everyone is always a vessel to someone.

It made him feel older, having married friends.

I don’t fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don’t fool around with it.