Short stories.......................

Virgil thought about the woman and the daughter as he drove back.  Had Mom been hitting on him, just the lightest, mildest of hits?  What was the sadness in the small girl's eyes?  Had she seen other men spoken to when Dad wasn't there?
     The whole thing seemed less than an invitation to romance than an invitation to a story of some kind.  Not journalism, a short story.  Something Jim Harrison might write.
     Virgil had had an interest in short stories when he was in college, but journalism seemed more immediate, something with its claws in the real world.  The older he got, though, the wider he found the separation between reported facts, on one hand, and the truth of the matter on the other hand.  Life and facts were so complicated that you never got more than a piece of them.  Short stories, though, and novels, maybe, had at least a shot at the truth.

-John Sanford, as culled from Chapter 17 of Heat Lightning