I've always liked reading books that contain funny lines or situations, and maybe because my work is known chiefly for its violence and misery, I made a more conscious attempt with The Heavenly Table to do that myself.

I've always been a bit of a pessimist in regard to mankind.

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].

Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life.

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.

Part of the reason might be that I was born in 1954 and I look upon my youth with great fondness, like many old men. And, though my work doesn't focus much on good things, I see that period as America's heyday. True, we had many problems, like racism and Vietnam, but we still weren't quite as nuts as we seem to be now.

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