We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.

Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.

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.