I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.