There is no country but the heart.

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure.

History is all explained by geography.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.