To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.

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.

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

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.