Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.

Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the US to Europe’s wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.

Drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.

Barbecue is the third rail of North Carolina politics.

Every time I look at Atlanta I see what a quarter of a million Confederate soldiers died to prevent.

I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.

Southerners smile more than other Americans.

The nature of the South is changing faster than the stereotypes are. Much of the South now looks like San Jose. Is it still southern?

Why can I write 'South' with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?

If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don't live there any more.

Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record.

I would live forever if I could, but not like this.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better.

Earth does not belong to us; we belong to earth. Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.

I know it may seem small and insignificant, but it's not about what it is, it's about what it can become. That's not a seed, any more than you're just a boy.

A sweet thing, for whatever time, to revisit in dreams the dear dad we have lost.

I'd make Jack Benny look like a philanthropist.

The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.

We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."