“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”

“The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.”

“any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man”

“For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful.”

“A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”

“...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.”

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”