You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.

I have spent a good part of my life looking for the perfect barbecue. There is no point in looking in places like Texas, where they put some kind of ketchup on beef and call it barbecue. Barbecue is pork, which narrows the search to the South, and if it's really good pork barbecue you are looking for, to North Carolina.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

I didn't know what narcissism was until I beheld my own naricssus.

I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.

I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.