It's very easy for me to feel sympathy for people who are messed up. It's not that I'm a pseudo-saint or a great person. I had a lot of trouble with drugs and alcohol when I was younger, and I know how easy it can be to mess up the rest of your life. One bad turn, one bad night, one big mistake, and everything is screwed up. Or maybe you were just born in the wrong house and raised in a bad way. I guess I can understand.

I don't think writing fiction has changed my worldview.

One of the reasons I write about religion is due to my own envy of people who truly feel the presence of god in their lives, good souls who believe devoutly in a supreme being and an afterlife.

I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.

There are a lot of writers from the South who would probably have once figured they needed to go to New York to make it who have stayed closer to home - people like David Joy, Tom Franklin, Sheldon Lee Compton, Wiley Cash, Mark Powell, and Alex Taylor.

I guess music is the one universal art form that most people can be moved by, regardless of where they come from, and for many it might be the closest they get to god, but I think taking a trip out into the country, away from the light pollution, and looking at a clear night sky is what does it best for me.

I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory.