“When you’re not involved, other people’s unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it’s you, it ceases to be a comedy.”

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don’t get it. I don’t get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I’m doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn’t think you ever had.

You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.

I’ll tell you why I like writing: it’s just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it’s also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It’s pretty old-fashioned, but it’s fun.

I don’t write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that’s it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

I wouldn’t buy somebody’s album on a dare if they called him a musician’s musician. I don’t write to be a writer’s writer. I don’t want to be like the little-magazine writer.

Love and despair go hand in hand.

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.

I hate and I love. And if you ask me how, I do not know: I only feel it, and I am torn in two.

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn’t want to be an academic.

Forgiveness gives birth to freedom so forgive them and set yourself free from the delusion of their chains and from the agony in your reality.

We don’t like trading agony for money

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

When most people don’t know what real agony is, some of us live on the hope that “someday things might get better”, being not really sure if they ever will.

The agony comes in waves. Pulling me down into its treacherous depths disguised as love. You are inviting and warm, but unpredictable and dangerous.

I was only ten the first time I remember getting stabbed. My agony pierced the air with a sickening scream.