Dead and still in the world was worse than dead and in the ground. Dead in the ground at least gave you the hope of heaven.

Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable – say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls – I wouldn’t go there. An ‘idea,’ especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be...

One thing’s sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children

Having shot down a number, some of which were anly wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I...

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don’t need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That’s where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.

She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel...

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for ‘Serena.’

It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes (185)

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I’m often surprised. A different ending or a new...

Nothing is but what is now

I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I’ve always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story’s larger rhythms,...

And darkness. You can’t see it no more than you can see air, but when its all around you sure enough know it.” (Serena, 65-66)

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about poetry – the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible – but also...

We want what’s in this world but we also want what ain’t.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in ‘The Trusty’ was going for water, I did not...

We had some good times at school. I didn’t know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that’s the way of it

What I’ve become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you’d rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself – if I’m not going be able...

A small profit it better than a big loss

‘Cool-Hand Luke’ is one of my favorite movies.

Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember...

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good...

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and...

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn’t continue to exist in the world

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read ‘Crime and Punishment,’ and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a...

Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

She walks in beauty.

I think that’s what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface…

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often...

A kind of annihilation, was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.

Don’t love anything that can be taken away.

I don’t even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn’t choose right, and she hadn’t, things...

I wouldn’t mind being a track and field coach.

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first… it’s amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until...

It’s a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start

You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn’t choose right, things got narrow real quick.

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond.