Chabon.

Shadow watched [the gun] pass between us with mild interest, holding, as a dog will, to the imperishable belief that anything might possibly be something edible.

Every story is the story of somebody's hard luck.

... don't think I didn't feel ridiculous, thrashing around out there like one of Picasso's wounded minotaurs, lumbering blindly after an angelic young girl ... While she danced, she kept her eyes closed and described solitary, interlocking circles across the floor, so that there were moments when I felt that she wasn't really dancing with me at all, but simply employing me as a kind of fulcrum, a hub on which to hang the whirling spokes of her own private revolutions ... I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.

...

Chabon decried the state of modern short fiction, saying that, with rare exceptions, it consisted solely of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story ... sparkling with epiphanic dew,"