Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.

The meaning of the story is the story.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.