“I don't like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.”

“I cut off his fingers to get him to talk, and when he'd confessed everything I wanted to hear, I had his fucking tongue cut out, and the stump cauterized."Everyone in the room stared at him."I called him an asshole, too," said Locke. "He didn't like that.”

“I can't tell you how much I hated him. Not the soap but his sermons and him acting like he was out for the good of everyone....-Mississippi Trial 1955”

“I couldn't see him but I could hear him snoring softly, humming, like a little airplane lost in the clouds.”

“I like to hear a man talk about himself because then I never hear anything, but good.”

“Environment affects me a great deal. A lot of the songs were written after the sun went down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: `Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work.' I don't recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it's in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn't let me go. I was, like, what does that phrase mean? But it was at the forefront of my mind, for a long period of time...”