Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em.

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].