Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

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

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.

Dying--shucks! If you kin handle the living, what's to be afraid of the dying?

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.