Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

Blanche: No, I have the misfortune of being an English instructor. I attempt to instill a bunch of bobby-soxers and drugstore Romeos with a reverence for Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe!

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together