People In Small Towns, Much More Than

My Books Are Elegiac In The Sense That They're Odes To A Nation That Even I Sometimes Think May Not Exist Anymore Except In My Memory And My Imagination.

The World Is Divided Between Kids Who Grow Up Wanting To Be Their Parents And Those Like Us, Who Grow Up Wanting To Be Anything But. Neither Group Ever Succeeds.

A Lot Of My Characters In All Of My Books Have A Self-destructive Urge. They'll Do Precisely The Thing That They Know Is Wrong, Take A Perverse Delight In Doing The Wrong Thing.

My Dad Had This Rock Hard Body And Would Work 12- To 13-hour Days. The Guys He Worked With Were Scrap-iron Guys. Nobody On That Road Crew Had Read A Book In 10 Years, But There Was Something About The Way They Lived I Really Admired.

What If All Everybody Needed In The World Was To Be Sure Of One Friend? What If You Were The One, And You Refused To Say Those Simple Words?