If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

Professional Southerners sicken me.

Literature is the history of the soul.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

You need to see a bit of hell now and then. That, and great joy.

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

Canada is the place where maple syrup is its own food group.

Christianity is not an accretion, it is not something added. It is a new total outlook which is satisfied with nothing less than penetration to the furthest corners of the mind and the understanding.

I swallowed hard and said as calmly as possible, “There’s been a murder. I don’t know what happened. The address is two-two-zero three Devonshire Court.

That civet-jasmine blend you're wearing tonight absolutely clashes with the third-level formal style of your dress, you know.

When you've only got one little shimmer of sunshine, you capture it best you can.

When the blind lead the blind, no wonder they both fall into - matrimony.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

The fans of 'The Hunger Games,' of the book, are very passionate. It's funny: Even at my concerts there are people holding up 'Cinna' signs.

Sugar and sand may be mixed together, but the ant rejects the sand and goes off with the sugar grain; so pious men lift the good from the bad.

If we could shut down all sport hunting in a moment, we would.