The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

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.

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

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

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

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

I don't really believe in a creative-writing major as an undergraduate. It's a bad idea, terrible. I've met creative-writing majors from other places and they don't know a goddamn thing. They're the worst students. They just think they're good because they could pass.