“There was no one, when I was in school, who talked about going in and blowing up students. The teachers were very stern and hateable, but nobody ever mentioned murder.”

Professional Southerners sicken me.

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?

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 would not say that I was, these days, a ‘student’ of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists.

Your backpack is a part of your identity as a student.

In school, I guess I was a difficult, know-it-all type of student… I was always complaining that music education was too academic.

My students are constantly amazing me.

In the mid- to late ’60s to the mid-’70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.

Students for a Democratic Society was founded in 1961.

Students may not learn what we think we are teaching them and what they learn may not be what we intended to teach them at all.