Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime..

Unadaptability is often a virtue..

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best selle….

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wa….

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

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..

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

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

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offe….

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

Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts..

A God you understood would be less than yourself..

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage ….

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

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story….

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 s….

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say..

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better..

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful..

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.