I guess it's ridiculously romantic, but I wanted to be a full tilt, sink-or-swim writer.

When I started to be a writer, I was not going to run the risk of boring you.

That shows you if we could have had him at full tilt how much better we would have played. We weren't going to play him at all, but he said he wanted to dress and see what he could do.

For a long time, I didn't think I wanted to live in the Ozarks or write about the region. It seemed to be a sure recipe for obscurity, and to be obscure was not my conscious ambition.

As a high-school drop-out, I knew I wanted to write, but I wasn't overly confident that I was going to be writing anything serious. I was happy enough with the idea that I could be a penny-a-word guy and survive.

I think my grandmother Woodrell was most responsible for my becoming a writer. She wasn't quite literate, but was very proud that she attended school as far as the third grade. She worked as a maid, housekeeper and cook.