My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.