Search

"Thomas Wolfe was my idol, and I modeled myself after Wolfe. And he too grew up in this small town. He was in North Carolina, I in Virginia, but we still had that same southerness of love of the land, love of the people, victim of history, worship of education and writing."

"I don't struggle because I was always the stupidest kid in the class and the idea that I would ever be brilliant was knocked out of me in the third grade. So I'm not sitting around trying to be brilliant, or  Shakespeare. I'm just trying to get the work I have in my head down on the page in the best way I possibly know how without putting that horrible pressure on myself of saying 'I'm going to write it today and in 200 years at Princeton they will be studying these words.' Yeah, I want my stuff to be as good as I can conceivably make it, but I am not going to put that on my head."