“The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.”

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

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.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

I wake my wife up at 3 a.m. and say, “Listen to this!”

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you… they’re a little away from you.

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

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.

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.

Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That’s a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don’t like the wispy and the vague… or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I’m impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I’ve done have come to me by instinct.

My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.

I never pulled a loaded pistol on anybody, but it got around that I did. It got turned into lore. It’s a myth. There’s so much bad gun stuff.

You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.

Every time I go near the stove, the dog howls.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty.

I intend to make Georgia howl.

The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.

I asked these Indians: “Do men ever make Chicha?” My question was met with gales of laughter. The women howled. Bent over in hilarity, one replied, “Men can’t brew. Chicha made by men would only make gas in the belly.

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

How exhausting it must be to fear death, when you can simply howl at the moon.