Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

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

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

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.

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

Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth