Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.

Southern Gothic is alive and well. It's not just a genre, it is a way of life.

It's a very Southern thing to be interested in dark stuff.

In the country in Kentucky, people are just amazed that anybody in New York wants to read about their lives.

Everything creepy and Southern isn't Faulknerian, just like everything annoying isn't Kafkaesque.

I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

I don't think I'll ever lose the feeling that I had when I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' - Harper Lee was going back into her childhood. I grew up in a real small town - Lee's was in the South, mine the Northwest - but small towns have a lot in common. There was such a revelation in knowing that a story could be told like that.

Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next 'Gone With the Wind.'

There's a lot of rednecks in the country where I grew up.

I came to the plain fields of Ohio with pictures painted by Hollywood movies and the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. None of them had much to say, if at all, about Dayton, Ohio.

I feel very Midwestern at my core.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

I grew up in Georgia, in a small town in the southwest corner of Georgia, actually, called Sylvester.

When I was in second grade, my mother moved from Miami to this evangelical conservative environment in western North Carolina, two miles down the road from Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth.

Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.

I don't want to be the Hollywood girl... I'm Southern and old-fashioned.

I loved 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' I read it later as an adult, but I loved 'We Have Always Lived in a Castle.' And that brings you around to 'The Lottery.' You can't pretend - it's a lottery in which you draw a name and people die. That's a short story, but it's such an incredible short story.

The opening novel of the 'Bayou Trilogy' was the first one I finished.

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

I loved growing up in Ohio.