When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

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.

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

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.