The truth is I've got the land on my back, an' it's drivin' me. Land is a hard driver.

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

Some women enjoy unhappy love affairs, you know, though I have always felt that they are greatly overrated.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

...I had grown up in a world that was dominated by immature age. Not by vigorous immaturity, but by immaturity that was old and tired and prudent, that loved ritual and rubric, and was utterly wanting in curiosity about the new and the strange. Its era has passed away, and the world it made has crumbled around us. Its finest creation, a code of manners, has been ridiculed and discarded.