Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.

Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.

I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.

People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.