...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.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

It is human defect — to try to know oneself by the self of another.

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

...a man does not die for words. He dies for his relation to them.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

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