What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.

Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind.

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Evil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.

Home is memory, home is your history, home is where you work. Some people want to abandon it and become truly local. But the questions are all there.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.