The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

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.

If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

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.