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I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.

Donald Ray Pollock

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Donald Ray Pollock
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 23
Novelist
Writer
Knockemstiff
Ohio
Stuff
Accurate
Someone
Southern
Thought
Labels
Might
Proper
Fairs
Fair
Gothic
Called
Ohio
Sure
Label

More quotes by Donald Ray Pollock

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Look, girls don't care how many push-ups you can do. They just want to get high and wear flowers in their hair. Maybe steal a car.
Donald Ray Pollock
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Religion can be a good thing, but basically the way I look at it is that it provides a moral code, common sense. But then people distort it and use it as an excuse to be a bully. It's sad, but that's the way it's worked for a several thousand years now.
Donald Ray Pollock
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When I first started out, I was trying to write stories about nurses and lawyers and a lot of people I didn't know anything about, and they just weren't working.
Donald Ray Pollock
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You're always hoping you can attract a bigger audience, but at the same time, I'd hate to give up what I write. If I could write Chick Lit or something like that and make money off it, that'd be great. But I just can't do it.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I look upon [writing about religion] as a nice way to get by in this precarious world, though I've never been able to do it myself.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I'm not sure I would have ever decided to try to write when I was forty-five if I hadn't already gotten that degree [in English].
Donald Ray Pollock
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I was always a big reader, even when everything was bad and miserable.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I spent thirty-two years in a paper mill in southern Ohio, and before that I worked in a meatpacking plant and a shoe factory.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I've never heard of that anthology [Vance Randolph, Pissing in the Snow], but you can be sure I'll buy it now.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I guess music is the one universal art form that most people can be moved by, regardless of where they come from, and for many it might be the closest they get to god, but I think taking a trip out into the country, away from the light pollution, and looking at a clear night sky is what does it best for me.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I think my characters - well, at least a few of them - are hoping or searching for some kind of contact with god.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I took a correspondence course with a guy at Ohio University. He gave me ten exercises, and one of them resulted in the story Bactine. It pleased me a lot more than anything else I'd ever done, so I kept messing around and by the time I got to Ohio State I'd written maybe eight stories.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.
Donald Ray Pollock
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A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there's something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom.
Donald Ray Pollock
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When I turned fifty, I decided to quit the mill and go to graduate school.
Donald Ray Pollock
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Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I don't really think the outburst is recent there have always been writers in Appalachia.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I remember a class I taught at Ohio State where I assigned a Mary Gaitskill story, which really wasn't that bad, and I had this one girl refuse to read it. But better that reaction than no reaction at all.
Donald Ray Pollock
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I think some people at Doubleday worried about that a bit when Knockemstiff came out, but, with the exception of one or two people who complained that I didn't do justice to the many good people who lived in the holler, most of the local objections have been aimed at the violence and foul language.
Donald Ray Pollock
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J.R. Angelella is a truly gifted writer. Zombie is one of the smartest, strangest, and most beautifully crafted coming-of-age stories you will ever encounter.
Donald Ray Pollock