There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

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.

Every precious thing that you want out of life starts from believing that you possess an unstoppable drive to continuously strive and thrive.

There was a positive side to not trying at something: you could always pretend that your life would have been different if you had.

I've got so many blessings in my life.

Actually, when you get into your sixties and above, you want to think about exercise differently. It's not just about you know cardiovascular or lifting weights. It's also about avoiding accidents.

String theory is 21 st century physics that fell accidentally into the 20th century.

There's some invisible guy, up in the sky, who can kill you, because he loves you.

Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

I've Learned that The mind is so #‎ Powerful , that if you focus on the Positive , it attracts the #‎ Positive , Enabling you to heal emotionally and physically.

One night I came home. I figured, let my wife come on. I'll play it cool. Let her make the first move. She went to Florida.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.