Daniel Woodrell Quotes
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I had bill collectors chasing me. We were skipping from town to town, not leaving forwarding addresses. The agent couldn't find me when he sold my book. He finally found me.
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I came back when I'd had a taste of other places and realized that I would never feel the same sense of connection to any place other than the Ozarks.
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I like the idea of everybody knowing each other; you know why you're doing things.
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I was basically raised to look for chances to get even with several families for stuff that happened 30 or 40 years before I was born.
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You want to hear an agent scream, say, 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.'
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There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.
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In February of 1972, a snowstorm blew into Kansas City, and I decided to hitchhike to California. The roads were icy, snowflakes howling, and nobody would drive me to the highway, so I humped through the snow and ice and caught a ride with a concerned cop to the Kansas Turnpike.
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Earned a bachelor's at 27, then an M.F.A. that is still completely unused and in mint condition, never taken out of the box.
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There are people so alienated from the mainstream of American culture that it's like a parallel universe. They don't expect anything but trouble from the square world. Every time they interact with that world, they're given a ticket, sent to jail, drafted. It's never good. So they live by a separate value system.
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If you don't allow yourself to change from book to book - take chances - it turns into a dullish job with no health benefits or pension plan and only intermittent paychecks.
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One of the interesting things about the Ozarks is you just about don't have street crime. It's strictly between people who know each other. It really isn't indiscriminate; it's kind of between themselves.
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I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.
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It was in a grim room on Eddy Street that I finally opened 'A Moveable Feast.' I read it all overnight. I read it again the next day.
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But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.
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Texas humor and Southern humor are pretty similar.
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I'm not from the movie world. I'm from the book world.
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I remember all the writers I started with who I was embarrassed to be around - they were so much better than me. A lot of them are no longer writing. I guess they were better rounded and had other options. Due to social discomfort, I only had the one road.
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I have a book in the pipeline of short stories. You want to hear an agent scream, say 'I'm thinking about doing a collection of short stories set in the Ozarks.'
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I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'
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I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books, I have to start a new direction.
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I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.
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We'd been living in the Arkansas Ozarks, then the Missouri Ozarks, because it is so inexpensive and does have natural wonders, but we shuffled things and moved to San Francisco, the corner of Dashiell Hammett and Pine.
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I had gone to enlist in the Navy, but they had a long waiting list and no need for high-school dropouts.
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I always loved the verve and vivacity of pulp and I kind of merged it with my own interest in family stories.