Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

History is not was, it is.

Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.