I never drink water. . . fish f**k in it.
Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.
The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.
I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.
When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.
There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.
There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
I come from a very poor family, with sisters. I never really knew my father, so I miss this strong image of a man in my life.
A state is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and Democrats.
Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.
Capitalism is about the mutual creation of wealth rather than the pillaging of it.