When you're at the basketball court watching a game, one person may be talking about a fight he had with his wife, another is talking about the last hard-on he got, someone else is talking about the presidential election. The language and the tone and the voice - I'd love to be able to capture that spontaneity.

Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.

Even in my adult years, when I heard a white person speaking in a Southern accent I was initially suspicious.

I'm very hard-nosed and cold-blooded and I can walk past a drowning man. If I have someplace else to go, well, tough s**t. I could do that. I can. Have. Sometimes, not because I was callous but had to do it.

I get off on anticipating and waiting much more than I get off on the actual event.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

One of the earliest lessons I learned as a child was that if you looked away from something, it might not be there when you looked back.