Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

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

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

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 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.

Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?