“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.”

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.

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.

I’m out and about meeting people all day long. And I’m very friendly; I talk to just about everybody I meet.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys.

There are things one does not say for a long time, but, once they are said, one never stops repeating them.

Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can’t do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time.

You know, you don’t get to survive that long without making some compromises.

Quotes are like cayenne pepper or some other strong spice: a little goes a long way, and too much is a disaster.

I never really got obsessed about one thing for long. I was a bit of a butterfly and a magpie.

In the short-run, the market is a voting machine – reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability – but in the long- run, the market is a weighing machine.