Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.

Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.

I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.

It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one's own world, as when any foreign country is visited.