I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish.

I really have no idea what the French think of my characters, or why The Devil All the Time did so well there.

I'm not sure I would have ever decided to try to write when I was forty-five if I hadn't already gotten that degree [in English].

I think the biggest influence on the book, as far as the humor goes, comes, at least indirectly, from the men I worked with in the paper mill. Some of them could make a dog laugh.

The biggest influence on my writing, besides snagging some ideas about black humor, was that the paper mill had a program where they paid 75 percent of the tuition and book [costs] for employees who wanted to go to college part-time.

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.

I think some people at Doubleday worried about that a bit when Knockemstiff came out, but, with the exception of one or two people who complained that I didn't do justice to the many good people who lived in the holler, most of the local objections have been aimed at the violence and foul language.