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.

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

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

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

Professional Southerners sicken me.

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

I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it's just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.