Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?
I wouldn’t buy somebody’s album on a dare if they called him a musician’s musician. I don’t write to be a writer’s writer. I don’t want to be like the little-magazine writer.
I found out about reviews early on. They’re mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That’s probably why I’m less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.
You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.
Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.
The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.
My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I’m glad I was disabused.
I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.
I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.
Love and despair go hand in hand.
A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.
I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.
The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don’t feel good all the time. There’s a lot of down, a lot of misery.
The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.
The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.
I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it’s just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.
I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book.