“I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.”

The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.

When I started I would have called myself an artist but the discipline I chose in art was music and text.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I’ve been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I’ve been pretty lucky.

It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.

For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it’s something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

I think it gets uncomfortable when you try to act like you didn’t just tell a joke that bombed.

So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

In a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.

We know that we need to explore desire in fiction – many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire – and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable.

I asked what you love, you said, ‘Anything with words.’

There is beauty in the chaos of living

The world is a diamond cut from our surprise.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Success means participating fully in the conscious evolution of humanity, contributing to the shift in time to avoid the chaos and disasters foreseen.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.