I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.

Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.

They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly.

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.

Catholics don't scream about Jesus, they scream about the bishop.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

When I count my blessings, I find you in every one.

You’re stuck with me.”She sniffled. “Promise?”He rested his forehead against hers. “Cross my heart.

When I wake up each morning

Make something people want and sell that, or be someone people need and sell you.

But when it comes to being loved, she's first/That's how I know The first cut is the deepest.

My God, give me neither poverty nor riches; but whatsoever it may be Thy will to give, give me with it a heart which knows humbly to acquiesce in what is Thy will.

Good praying is more easily caught than taught.

I love coming in for quick pops. You come in. You score. You leave. You're on the golf course. It's great. You don't carry any story.

I feel as if God had, by giving the Sabbath, given fifty-two springs in every year.

Once we had become locked in on a schedule, he (Coach Denny Green) often created a disruption (artificial adversity) to that schedule just to see how guys would respond.