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

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is… We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

I thought I was writing for a fairly hip, intelligent crowd; I just thought there were more of them out there. But they’re not. They’re not out there waiting. They’re not gonna use their intelligence on your book.

I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.

I found out about reviews early on. They’re mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That’s probably why I’m less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.

The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer’s drug, but I’m glad that’s been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.

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!”

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’m a little old-fashioned.

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

We are a little piece of continual change, looking at an infinite quantity of continual change.

Hearing that [David] Bowie passed was like you don’t really believe it. It’s as if the sky shifted a little bit, to remind you it was there.

Every time I come home, and every time before I leave, I invite all my friends and I get hummus from this little shack in Tel Aviv called Baadunas.

I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York.

I have spent myself on all kinds of things … I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.

Men demonstrate their courage far more often in little things than in great.