I feel like someone after a deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I'm still plucking seaweed out of my hair.

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

The characters write the plot. Their natures do.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

I show how much of the wars of religion involved Catholics killing Catholics, Lutherans killing Lutherans, and Catholic-Protestant collaboration. (Page 10 The Myth of Religious Violence)

I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.

Little less than a promise, and a little more than a chance.

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place - service - social service - the ants creed, the bees creed.

Actors today go into TV, which I don't consider has a lot to do with acting. They only think of stardom

There's something about a blank page that makes me tingle.

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?

I realized when I was 23 that I had never really tried anything.

Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.