I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

All those layers of silence upon silence.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.