"I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next." — Harper Lee

Well, they're Southern people, and if they know you are working at home they think nothing of walking right in for coffee. But they wouldn't dream of interrupting you at golf.

I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn't have an eventful childhood.

I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.