I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

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.

It’s never overreacting to ask for what you want and need.

Ask nothing from your running, and you'll get more than you ever imagined!

In the 20th century alone, there have been 1, 600 books about the circus. My adding one more would be superfluous unless I do something totally new and different.

In one day, I have times where I'm feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I'm the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

Personally, I'd rather have pins stuck in my eyes than endure a conversation with John Kerry, but I'd love to hang with Bush.

Comedy is a socially acceptable form of hostility and aggression. That is what comics do, stand the world upside down.

... a worker was seldom so much annoyed by what he got as by what he got in relation to his fellow workers.

We be of one blood, ye and I

I started reading and talking and interviewing nutritionists and a thread was starting to form for me which is - a protein digests in a different rate of speed than a carbohydrate.

A good rule for writers: do not explain overmuch.