I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.

This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.

A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.