When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... 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.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.

He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.