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

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.

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.

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.

It is impossible to be truly artistic without the risk of offending someone somewhere.

Mason knew what it was like to say things you didn’t mean, to just have them vomit out, and then feel that crushing ache when you realized you could never pull them back.

An idle mind is not a devil's workshop but a wanderlust

Half-wits talk much, but say little.

I get irritated, I get upset. Especially when I'm in a hurry. But I see it all as part of our training. To get irritated is to lose our way in life.

(on Warner Brothers) This studio has more suspensions than the Golden Gate Bridge.

In masks and gown we haunt the street And knock on doors for trick or treat Tonight we are the king and queen, For oh tonight it's Halloween!

Natural gas is a bridge fuel. But it's not a bridge - it's a gangplank. It's either a bridge in space or a bridge in time. The bridge in time we don't need. We have renewable technology right now.

I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.

Today, many companies are reporting that their number one constraint on growth is the inability to hire workers with the necessary skills.