So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I’ve read so often that I’ve internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Criticism at the wrong time, even if it's legitimate criticism, can be seriously damaging and make the writer lose faith in what he's doing. It's the timing that's all-important.

Liars are exhausting people.

I have no history but the length of my bones.

I, fortunately, have never worried about irritating people.

A truly peaceful mind is very sensitive, very aware.

When I'm able to bring together the two worlds that I love so much - film and TV - is a documentary feature, it's nirvana!

I knew a bit but we don't study a lot of British history at school in Australia. We have our own 50-year period to concentrate on.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest.

I was obsessed with the Olympics. It's so exciting to see that level of excellence and endurance.

The world as we know it is falling apart at the seams, because it's an inadequate container for the truth of who we are.

The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.