The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

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.

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.