Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

I know what I want.

Democracy is government by the people, for the people. Without the responsibility of the people, and without the involvement of the people - all you have left is GOVERNMENT.

You do not need to import greatness from another; you just need to act on your own.

I am enslaved to my work, always wanting the impossible, and never, I believe, have I been less favoured by the endlessly changeable weather.

My job, at the very least, doesn't change at all.

Since luck's a nine days' wonder, wait their end.

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.

I havent partied since...last Friday!

Imagine what I would have done with my fire-breathing fists.

Why is it that the most important stuff to listen to is almost always the stuff we don't want to hear?