I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.

It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.

Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.

We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.