Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them – in which case, if you don’t watch out, they cease to be adversaries.
The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
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.
Tennessee’s a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia’s a lousy state too.
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.
I love a lot of people, understand none of them...
I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I’m sure of it.
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
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.
The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.
I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid it will not be controversial.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.
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.