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.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.