Daniel Woodrell
I think there are some folks who don't particularly like what I have to say, but on the whole, the reaction has been very positive.
Most of my characters aren't hillbillies anyway. Let's just call them proletariat with a disposition towards criminal activity.
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.
Just because it's got a gun doesn't make it a crime novel, and just because there's a horse doesn't make it a western.
I learned my values. It's better to be poor than to be beholden. Wealth is not the object of life. You should be polite as long as possible, and when you can't be polite anymore, don't run.
I know people who have, until recently, lived with dirt floors. There are people who live way back off the grid, without electricity. Not a whole lot, but quite a few. That's a choice for a lot of them. There might be a religious element in their isolation, at least with some of them.
I was thinking of my father's family. I can find their graves, but not that much about them. They didn't do anything notable enough to be in the records of newspapers.
I'm surviving and developing as a writer. I don't know what brings you to mass attention in terms of sales. But I've gotten more and more comfortable with it. Of course if that changes, I'll be comfortable with that. All I can do is write the best books I can.
My father was a salesman, and I always said I wouldn't be one.
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.
Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.Collection: Dark
Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.Collection: Ought
The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.Collection: Dream
He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, 'You got to be ready to die every day - then you got a chance.'Collection: Chance
Fading light buttered the ridges until shadows licked them clean and they were lost to nightfall.Collection: Light
Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.Collection: Baby
This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.Collection: Forever
Pine trees with low limbs spread over fresh snow made a stronger vault for the spirit than pews and pulpits ever could.Collection: Snow
For a long time, I thought you could remain isolated and survive, and I didn't want to change that. But over the last three or four books, I've become more comfortable with the idea that I'm not really throwing anything away by being a bit more open about my books and life.Collection: Book
A person has to show some spirit -- fate just about never shines on chickenshits.Collection: Fate
It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.Collection: Stories
I was not much used to women except for mothers. Everything I did, they did different.Collection: Mother
I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.Collection: Thinking
When I left Iowa, I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public.Collection: Reading
I, myself, often wished to be spared the expectation of better days ahead or such.Collection: Expectations
Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they'd get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.Collection: Hate
I had been born shoved to the margins of the world, sure, but I had volunteered for the pits.Collection: Pits
The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.Collection: Dream
Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellowed dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again.Collection: Eye