I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.

Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.

Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door

You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.

First buy a cowboy hat and boots. Then you're on your way to being a Texan.