So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

People always want to call me a Southern writer but though I grew up in the South, I don't feel that the label quite fits my work.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to--I mean, writing is a lonely business.

Writing...is an art; and artists...are human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is....

What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for …

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.