The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...

I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.