You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

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.

Well, I'm not interested in murder so much in the aspects of, you know, sleuthing and detection and that sort of thing. I'm much more interested in the echoes …

Well, I didn't know any snake-handling ministers.

Literature is analysis after the event.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

'Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.'