The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
The dead don’t bother with particulars.
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.
The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.
I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened.
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.
I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.
If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.
Dear God, I don’t want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don’t want to have created God to my own image as they’re so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don’t let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.
I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.
It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.