I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

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

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.