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Quotations from Southerners'All southern literature can be summed up
in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie,
Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'
She raised me up to be a southern writer,
but it wasn't easy."
-- Pat Conroy
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Suzanne Sugarbaker was so right when she said:
'There's just nothing better in life than to ride around
on the back of a convertible with a crown on your head.'"
-- Jill Conner Browne
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"A person doesn't have to live in the South to want
to share good food with friends at the end of a warm day
when the breeze is just right or to bask in the rewarding afterglow
of a hard day's work in the garden. Southerners didn't invent
these sorts of simple pleasures - we just refined them."
-- Carlton Riley Smith
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"I opened the safe, took a biscuit off a plate,
and punched a hole in it with my finger.
Then with a jar of cane syrup, I poured the
hole full, waited for it to soak in good, and
then poured again."
-- Harry Crews
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"If I could have, to hold forever, one brief place and time of beauty,
I think I might choose the night on that high lonely bank
about the St. John's River. We found there a deserted cabin,
gray and smooth as only cypress weathers . . ."
-- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"I think when a writer makes over, or partly makes over, his experience
into a poem or story, he will then tend to forget the experience itself.
Somehow, in the act of thus formalizing and externalizing a memory,
he has also lost his power to evoke it - it's as if he had put it into cold storage."
-- Conrad Aiken
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Read, read, read. Read everything. See how they do it,
just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice
and studies the master. Read. You'll absorb it. Then write.
If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."
-- William Faulkner
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"There is more than one way of skinning a rabbit. I found that out early in life
when one rabbit skinner told me to do it in such-and-such a manner, and another
told me to do it differently. I tried both, but either the rabbit's legs slipped off the knob
on the barn door, or I could not get the jacket down over the shoulders. After that
I did it my own way, and I've been doing it that way ever since."
-- Erskine Caldwell
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Mama wanted me to be a preacher.
I told her coachin' and preachin' were a lot alike."
--Bear Bryant
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"In the country, if you had a mean neighbor, you could keep off his land
and make him keep off yours. But in the city, all the foulness and misery
and brutality of your neighbors was part of your life."
-- Willa Cather
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Laughter is God's hand in a troubled world."
-- Minnie Pearl
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The life of a person who isn't writing a novel is too strenuous for me."
--Caroline Gordon
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"A great writer is more than his doctrine, more than his technique,
more than his psycho-analytical determinants, more than his social significance.
He is, indeed, more than the sum of all of these."
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The South always makes good reading.
It features the virtues and vices, writ large,
of the nation as a whole. It's good entertainment.
It's high drama."
--Fred Hobson
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"All literature is gossip."
--Truman Capote
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"I suppose an author's choice of his own work must always
be decided by such private knowledge of the margin between
intention and the accomplished fact."
-- Katherine Anne Porter
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"It's the sensual texture of things here.
It's the wood smoke that's in the air
on a dreary winter day. It's the chicken
and barbecue that they sell in little stores
and service stations. It's the conversations about people
from the past with old family names that intertwine."
-- Willie Morris
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"We know how much, ordinarily, is seen in the arts - very little indeed
by the average eye; and how much rubbish is talked, rubbish that is
somewhat insincere, faddish, imitative, or else fetched up from sentiments
within the speaker and not from any perception of the work of art."
-- Stark Young
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"If I were asked what is the one, over-all symbol or image gained from my living
that most nearly represents what I feel to be the essence of American life,
I'd say that it was that of a man struggling mightily to free his personality
from the daily and hourly encroachments of American life."
-- Richard Wright
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"My goal in life is to make some tiny headway
toward lifting from Southerners some tiny bit of the
burden of having to prove [to Northerners] that we are
being tongue-in-cheek."
--Roy Blount, Jr.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"In the back seat was a short story writer from Iowa
who, until I took him to one, had never seen a cotton
field and who, until I enticed him to, had never danced
on a table. Don't worry--I said to him as we boogied--
it's only Mississippi, you'll be fine when you get home."
--Beverly Lowry
~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Through the smoke and the racket of the noisy
Chicago bar float Louisiana bayous, muddy old
swamps, Mississippi dust and sun, cotton fields,
lonesome roads, train whistles in the night,
mosquitoes at dawn, and the Rural Free Delivery
that never brings the right letter."
--Langston Hughes
~~~~~~~~~~~~
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