When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said. "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.