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

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.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

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.

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

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.

I don't really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.