The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

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.

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

I got a great imagination, and I pay close attention to my surroundings and I'm very observant.

I've always liked writing. Even when I was in art school and thought I was going to be a gallery painter, I liked to pair my artwork with writing. And so that naturally led to drawing comics.