I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.

People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside.