I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

Professional Southerners sicken me.

Literature is the history of the soul.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.

What must human beings be, to destroy what they can never create?

Most of my problems have no answer or else the answer is worse than the problem.

I emphasize that I am full of ambition and hope and of full charm of life. But I can renounce all at the time of need, and that is the real sacrifice.

I feel challenged every day, when I come to work. I feel like I have to step up my game, and that's a great thing.

Sometimes books don't find us until the right time.

Mind is a verb not a noun.

I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary.

They used to say that knowledge is power. I used to think so, but I know now they mean money.

Passion is the genesis of genius.