People always want to call me a Southern writer but though I grew up in the South, I don't feel that the label quite fits my work.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to--I mean, writing is a lonely business.

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment an…

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long peri…

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

Writing...is an art; and artists...are human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is....

'Naturally,' observed Nikolai Petrovich, 'you were born here, so everything is bound to strike you with a special -' 'Really, Daddy, it makes absolutely no dif…