As a Southerner I would have to say that one of the main importances of the War is that Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of ….

I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between m….

But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and qual….

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made..

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library..

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything ….

I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the….

Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is..

Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience..

A fact is not a truth until you love it..

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't bel….

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, incl….

A rich man's war and a poor man's fight..

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears..

I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way..

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Ci….

People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those….

Generally the first week in September brings the hottest weather of the year, and this was no exception. Overhead the fans turned slow, their paddle ….

The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only th….

North was only a direction indicated by a compass--if a man had one, that is, for otherwise there was no north or south or east or west; there was on….

Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves..