Professional Southerners sicken me.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

Literature is the history of the soul.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?

Why would anyone want perfection when growth comes from flaws?

Oh, you are mad!" she exclaimed, quite out of patience."Possibly. But I like my madness.

Travel is fatal to prejudice bigotry and narrow-mindedness.

[On Nijinksy:] Ah, he took my breath away! The body that man had, the controlled power, the iron fragility. He was a note of music. He was dance!

If this is a Great Society, I'd hate to see a bad one.

Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.

she smiled at him, and at her own fears.

There's usually a rhythm and a melody in my head, and that creates an emotional state

Rather than focus on your critics, focus on the people who are impacted by your work.