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.

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

Professional Southerners sicken me.

Literature is the history of the soul.

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

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

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

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

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

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.

The most frightful of all spectacles is the strength of the civilization without its mercy.

The best fathers have the softest, sweetest hearts. In other words, great dads are real marshmallows.

I pray not for victory, but to do my best.

Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.

Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

Most fashion models do not look good in bikinis because they're too thin.

On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.

I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.