All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal. |
Conviction without experience makes for harshness. |
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. |
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not. |
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best. |
I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial. |
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it. |
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. |
I've felt too bad to type them. |
It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes. |
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have. |
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. |
The difficulty of all this, |
The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech. |
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. |