You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

Goodness . . . You got to make it out of badness . . . Because there isn't anything else to make it out of.

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

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

You don’t choose a story, it chooses you.