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 the little-magazine writer.

I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they're not. They're not out there waiting. They're not gonna use their intelligence on your book.

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.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

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 impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.