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

Professional Southerners sicken me.

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

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

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.

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.