Southern Writers Quotes & Sayings

{Summertime she speaks of winter, she eats ham, but speaks of beef, got a good man but, flirts with another. She might as well go to hell, cause she ain't gonna be happy in heaven either!} — Nancy B. Brewer

Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share. — Patricia Hickman

Farm labor had stained his hands, but music stained his heart. — Brenda Sutton Rose

Life can surprise you. You want something with every ounce of blood that flows in your veins, and then one day it's yours. Right there before you. Everything. You break out in a cold sweat with the undeniable realization that what you really want is home. Sometimes finding home is a long time coming. A long journey. — Brenda Sutton Rose

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it. — Lillian Hellman

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights. — Brenda Sutton Rose

I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay. — Donald Ray Pollock

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit. — Patricia Hickman

Are you aware that Jesus Christ can spell? I get so tired of you spelling every slang and cuss word that crosses your mind, as though you are pulling one over on the Lord. — Brenda Sutton Rose

I know one thing - very few writers in Southern California get to write what they want to write. We are more or less worker ants, working for either film companies or tv companies or Internet companies. We do a lot of assigned work. Feelings hardly ever enter into it. If they do, they tend to be on a sort of soap opera level. — Larry Gelbart

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it. — Willie Morris

The truth had lacerated him to the bone, had punctured his heart, and had ripped through his soul. The truth had slain him and tended to his wounds. The truth had hated him and loved him. The truth had opened his eyes to his own faults. — Brenda Sutton Rose

The central character is an incomplete package of yearning that takes the length of the novel to complete. Completion, though, is not to be confused with perfection. — Patricia Hickman

Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within. — Patricia Hickman

He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember. — Brenda Sutton Rose

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. — Flannery O'Connor

Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things ... — Katherine Anne Porter

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. — Flannery O'Connor

If I weren't so screwed up, I would've sold my soul a long time ago for a handsome man who made me feel pretty or who could at least treat me to a Millionaire's Martini. Instead I lingered over a watered down Sparkling Apple and felt sorry about what I was about to do to the blue-eyed bartender standing in front of me. Although I shouldn't, after all, I am a bail recovery agent. It's my job to get my skip, no matter the cost.If I weren't so screwed up, I would've sold my soul a long time ago for a handsome man who made me feel pretty or who could at least treat me to a Millionaire's Martini. Instead I lingered over a watered down Sparkling Apple and felt sorry about what I was about to do to the blue-eyed bartender standing in front of me. Although I shouldn't, after all, I am a bail recovery agent. It's my job to get my skip, no matter the cost. Yet, I had been wondering lately. What was this job costing me? Yet, I had been wondering lately. What was this job costing me? — Miranda Parker

Because of sorrow, my awareness of life's pulse is strongly detectable. It is syncopation while I journey, a lap of ocean in the eyes of every person I meet. This awareness informs the flesh of my stories. Grief has been an odd companion, at first a terror, but now I am all the better having accepted it for its intrinsic worth. — Patricia Hickman

Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together. — Brenda Sutton Rose

What we have ... is something most folks wait a lifetime for, and only touch for a heartbeat. They let go too quickly, or they're too scared to hold on, or they never see what's right in front of them. But we're going to hold on as tight as we can. - Jonah Walker — Molli Moran

I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together. — Alice Walker

He had spent his life running, secrets spitting at his back. With the coach clocking him, Kevin took flight, his feet hitting the ground and pulling back with tremendous speed. Demons--visions of the eager hands of pretty boys with firm bodies--chased him, chipping away at the space separating them, their claws a whisper away from his flesh. He ran until he felt his lungs would give out; like a madman he ran. — Brenda Sutton Rose

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead man who had answers. — James Caskey

My mother's dress bears the stains of her life:
blueberries, blood, bleach,
and breast milk;
She cradles in her arms a lifetime
of love and sorrow;
Its brilliance nearly blinds me. — Brenda Sutton Rose

I reckon Southern writers are a lot like biscuit makers...more than one can give ya a good feed. — Lola Faye Arnold

Perspective and perseverance are carved by time and constructed by wisdom. — A.D. Sams

Magic of Southern expressions? Similes and metaphorical allusions. They are the yellow highlighter of conversation. — Tim Heaton

Kevin knew he had to always outrun the enemy inside him, and if that meant playing football, he'd do it. During puberty, he had taken off running and found too late that he couldn't stop. In dreams that turned into nightmares he ran in fear, ripped from sleep in a sweat, shouting,"Run! — Brenda Sutton Rose

I was really in Italy. Not Maya Angelou, the person of pretensions and ambitions, but me, Marguerite Johnson, who had read about Verona and the sad lovers while growing up in a dusty Southern village poorer and more tragic than the historic town in which I now stood. I was so excited at the incredible turn of events which had brought me from a past of rejection, of slammed doors and blind alleys, of dead-end streets and culs-de-sac, into the bright sun of Italy, into a town made famous by one of the world's greatest writers. I — Maya Angelou

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who. — Rick Bragg

I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer. — Patricia Hickman

The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them. — Flannery O'Connor

Ever since I could remember reading, I was a fan of Horror Novels, then just an Avid reader of all things dark and deeply written or off the cuff styles and not so bland and sterile as if the grammar police forensically wrote it to be safe, then re-edited it to be even more annoyingly not from an emotion but from a text book, I love dark dark fiction that's why i write it. Some of my favorite writers are Anne Rice, Hunter S. Thompson and Clive Barker, perhaps you can sense this in my writing. — Liesalette

Many Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story. — Erskine Caldwell

Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face. — Randolph Randy Camp

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure. — Meg Wolitzer

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin. — James Caskey

Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant ... — Flannery O'Connor

It takes thirty-three days to write a book
only thirty-three days. remember, writers lie for a living. — Darynda Jones