You never know when somebody will pull you to them.
The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for.
The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate yourself to. Looking back and seeing how you got where you are is a useful way to combat disorientation.
Publishers give you deadlines for those last phases of production that are perfectly comfortable for them. So, to whatever extent I can, I like to push those to give me a little more time, and make it so that they’re as uncomfortable as I am.
Writing doesn’t come real easy to me. I couldn’t write a novel in a year. It wouldn’t be readable. I don’t let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.
What I’m certain I don’t want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I’d had more nerve.
It’s a good thing war is so terrible or else we’d get to liking it too much.
When all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. Only desire trumps time.
Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.
Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.
I’ve never been very attached to genre labels and never set out intentionally to write historic fiction. Besides, what you consider historic depends on how far back your memory extends.
Mainly because people were what they were and you couldn’t change them. most of the time, they couldn’t change themselves, even if they were desperate to be somebody different from who they were. So, best keep your distance.
Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it’s a common mistake nonetheless.
Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in Black Mask magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.
What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?
It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.
I do the same things I did when I was 12 years old: I ride bikes, I read books, I walk in the woods. And I listen to music.
I was 46 when ‘Cold Mountain’ came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm.
If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music, I suspect I’d stick with the music.
People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances.