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

When I'm writing, I'm thinking, "Well, this might be a book that I'll always be happy with, and certainly readers will be happy with." But another part of me knows that when I'm past the stage of writing, the book is gonna have good things about it, bad things about it - probably more bad than good. I just know that. That's who I am.

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

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 don't like the way question marks look. They're really ugly. They look like blots. At some other point in my life, I might have disliked them because I never knew how to properly apply them. Also commas, and whether they were outside the quote or inside the quote - that all seemed like an unnecessary pain in the ass.

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

Our thoughts, our language, are always at a distance from whatever they're trying to describe. We have other kinds of languages, like mathematics, like music, like art, but there's always that gap.