“The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.”

I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.

When I started I would have called myself an artist but the discipline I chose in art was music and text.

I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I’ve been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I’ve been pretty lucky.

It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.

For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it’s something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

I think it gets uncomfortable when you try to act like you didn’t just tell a joke that bombed.

So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

In a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.

Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.

For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without invoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all.

I believe in God, family, and McDonald’s. And in the office, that order is reversed.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it’s at a party or it’s in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

Creative people have to be fed from the divine source. I have to get fed. I had to get filled up in order to pour out.

Growth comes from chaos, not order.

I don’t really like politics that much. And I like the order and simplicity of sports. They have an ending. You can argue with your friends about it, but in the end you still like sports. I almost love the fantasy world of sports more than the real world.

God will never adjust His agenda to fit ours. He will not speed up His pace to catch up with ours; we need to slow our pace in order to recover our walk with Him. God will not scream and shout over the noisy clamor; He expects us to seek quietness, where His still small voice can be heard again.