If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.

When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.