The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.