It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

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.