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

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I’ve had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

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.

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 still remember the first gig where I got people going, it was Rascals in New Jersey, and the place was packed. I was scared. People were expecting me to be funny. I gotta be honest, every time I walk into a club, it’s that same fear.

Marijuana? It’s harmless really, unless you fashion it into a club and beat somebody over the head with it

I go to dance clubs…about once a year just to justify the other 364 days I spend in my apartment going ‘God, what idiots!’

If I can sell out clubs and theaters and play dirtbags in movies, and get blown up in a car or get the crap beat out of me in a movie, that’s good for me; I’m good.

I can see myself staying at Blackburn for the rest of my career – unless I move to another club at some stage

I don’t want to go to Portsmouth or any other club that has no ambitions.

I’d rather be shot than be seen falling out of some trendy club.

There are times when a golfer is tempted to throw her clubs away and forget the whole ‘humblin’ business.’ At other times, she wouldn’t trade places with a queen-that’s when the shots are long and true, and putts are dropping.