You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.

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.

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

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.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.