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.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

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.

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

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.

Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.