Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.