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

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling.

There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.