Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.