The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don't feel good all the time. There's a lot of down, a lot of misery.

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.

Where the waters do agree, it is quite wonderful the relief they give.

When you connect with people, they want to help you.

When it came to the music that we produced, I am pretty happy with what we did.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

That's generally true of people who drop bombs from high altitudes. You don't know what's going on below. You don't see the human consequences of what you're doing.

Stability leads to instability. The more stable things become and the longer things are stable, the more unstable they will be when the crisis hits.

Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

If Bush wins, I'm going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."