The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

The life you save may very well be your own.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.