I went from having 50 listeners to 50 million listeners.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

I wish that I had re-edited 'Theft By Finding' after I did the audio. Because the audio took 40 hours in the studio, and I was standing on my feet. So toward the end of it I'd be looking at certain diary entries and I would think, "Is this really worth my time to read this out loud?" And I would think, "No, it is not." I would have cut out 75 pages, just because I was tired of standing up.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.