A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means..

I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It's a myth. There's so much bad gun stuff..

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

I don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way..

I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it's just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me..

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 wreckin….

Love and despair go hand in hand..

I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful to j….

I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places….

I do believe that as you write more and age, the arrogance and most of the vanity goes. Or it is a vanity met with vast gratitude, that you were hit ….

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..

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm imp….

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy..

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road..

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, "Listen to this!".

I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I'm glad I was disabused..

Professional Southerners sicken me..

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you..

I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like th….

Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That's a supreme joy. And why ….

Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to ….