From The Paris Review’s interview with Barry Hannah—
INTERVIEWER
Some writers turn away completely from their origins, though. Like Cormac McCarthy.
HANNAH
Right, he turned western when he went out to El Paso. He’s one of my favorites. He invests a region. Learns it so thoroughly it’s as if God visited that place and made no mistakes about the botany, flora, fauna. He has about three thousand books, I hear. He had so many books on this upper story of this little concrete house he has, the floor was about to cave in. So the man reads everything there is about the place and you can tell that. Nobody else like him.