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

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) "There is always something." And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge." And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

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