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

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

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.

The first two drinks were always wonderfully liberating. You think better. You’re braver, and you’ll say anything. If you could just hang in there with two or three, it’d be beautiful. The trouble was I couldn’t.

Literature is the history of the soul.

Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.

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.

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

My father was a very good Boy Scout. He was very skilled with knots, and he showed me how to tie a bow tie.

Animals are a huge part of my life, so yes, if you are going to be a part of my life, you would need to have the same love for animals.

But the frat boys were all frivolous and idiotic in our minds now, a bunch of conformist fools going through the motions of hip.

Now, for some of you it doesn’t matter. You were born rich and you’re going to stay rich. But here’s my advice to the rest of you.

What did moths bump into before the electric light bulb was invented? Boy, the lightbulb really screwed the moth up didn’t it? Are there moths on their way to the sun now going, It’s gonna be worth it!.

I wasn’t terribly aware of Catwoman. She was a DC comics character and as a kid, I wasn’t terribly fond of the DC comics characters. I was a Marvel boy.

As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I’m convinced it’s not that uncommon. A lot of 10 or 12 year old boys become obsessed with Egypt. It’s a bit like young girls and horses.

The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else–grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.