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

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

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

There is no country but the heart.

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of... What you don't know know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist... If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

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

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.