The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You're braver, and you'll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it'd be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn't.

The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer's drug, but I'm glad that's been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.

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 by something as you stood in the way of it, that anybody is listening.

My stories do have plot. They're not just scattered language; they're controlled, toward an end.

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

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