"Why do the lives of writers seem so… train-wrecky? Mary Flannery O’Connor was no exception. She survived the back-to-back snake pits of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Yaddo colony only to find herself trapped at home with her strong-willed mother and crippling lupus. The life of this Southern Gothic belle makes the somber existence of Emily Dickinson look like a barrel full of monkeys."

"Sling Blade. I loved it. It was a southern story and it was such a simple story, but the character work was just some of the best that I’d ever seen. I was fortunate enough to work with Billy Bob [Thornton] recently and — just looking back at that movie and what he did and knowing him as a person — it was just one of the most interesting, well-designed characters. It’s always fascinating to watch."

"It was our second record and we'd gotten considerably better, and were gelling a lot more organically as a group. Soul Food was essentially meant to be a compilation album and we had stumbled upon our own strange brew, and then with Still Standing we went into business together. We totally defined Southern hip hop for what it could be; it could be impact and nationwide. It's still a record I'm proud of to this day."

"I first saw two of my favorite personal documentaries in 1985 and 1986. Both greatly influenced me as a filmmaker. Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March offered up a neurotic self-portrait of the filmmaker’s pursuit of Southern women, while in God’s Country, Louis Malle visits with struggling farmers in Glencoe, Minnesota, a town an hour away from the Twin Cities, where I was born and raised. Sherman’s March has enjoyed far greater acclaim and exposure, but God’s Country is ultimately the more sophisticated film. These are both portraits of human pathos. But where McElwee depicts seemingly wacky Southern women with a palpable sense of disrespect for his subjects, Malle interacts with equally extreme characters in the North and manages to express a profound sense of respect and admiration, enabling us to feel sympathy for them and, ultimately, for ourselves. No disrespect to McElwee though: one of my favorite reviews of my film The Royal Road (by Bérénice Reynaud in Senses of Cinema) calls it “a sort of butch reply” to Sherman’s March."