Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Every place there's people, there's badness.

Want to change the world? Upset the status quo? This takes more than run-of-the-mill relationships. You need to make people dream the same dream that you do.

Rarely does the truth set us free. Usually it chains us to the earth like a ghost.

You want me to spy on a National Colour operative?''Wow, ' she said, 'you got it. I thought I was going to have to explain that one for a lot longer.

But from the good health of the mind comes that which is dear to all and the object of prayer-happiness.

Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to the globe as a whole; yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.

All decays begin in the closet; no heart thrives with out much secret converse with God, and nothing will make amends for the want of it.

Nobody had books at home. My dad was a very educated person, so he would have books at home. All Spanish books. That helped. Most of my homies had no books at home.

Unproductive worry - like Parkinson's proverbial law - tends to expand to fill the time available.

I watched 'A Chorus Line' over and over when I was growing up, to the point that I was able to recite the entire movie.