If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

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

...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.

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

For the truth is a terrible thing.

The poem . . . is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

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