I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.

Without love for my fellow man and respect for nature, to me, life is an obscenity.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

"What for?" I said. "What for, Tante Lou? He treated me the same way he treated her. He wants me to feel guilty, just as he wants her to feel guilty. Well, I'm not feeling guilty, Tante Lou. I didn't put him there. I do everything I know how to do to keep people like him from going there. He's not going to make me feel guilty."