The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

It is impossible to pretend that you are not heir to, and therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time and place that give you life -- without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.

I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.

Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence, and therefore is not susceptible to any arguments whatsoever.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.