Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

It's very simple. If you learn how to write well, to write with depth, cream will rise to the top. You'll get published. But, there is no secret.

I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart.

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'