I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it's probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers.

I think, most of us, when we look back over our lives, see perhaps moments when everything was dangerous and precarious. We're making all these mistakes, and yet somehow we make it through. It's the making it through that that interests me. To go through the valley of trouble and come out the other side. That's what we all have to do.

Tom Drury Quotes