I don’t see any point in making a big fuss about it. ‘ I just said, ‘No, thank you.’

So what this is is a ‘road novel.’ Eventually entire civilization (in the South) had been uprooted and people found security only in movement, … That interested me enormously … A friend from New Orleans,...

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.

He was a brilliant man, a complex man. The march justified him as a military man, but he had a great deal of guilt about it, and when the war was over he immediately left...

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

Its glory is all moonshine.

The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

You could go for miles without seeing an end to the procession of troops and horses and wagons, … An eagle aloft in the April winds high over the landscape would only see something iridescently...

We’re always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it’s a little raw and nervy.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people,...

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

You can’t do that to Carl.

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I thought I would lose, so I didn’t prepare a speech.

Not really, … There is no Carl. I made him up.

You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is...

I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don’t know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.

It seemed to me so much more sensible to make something up than go through the tedious business of interviewing someone. I was just a kid and so maybe I was scared that no one...

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

For some reason that excited me.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.

The thing about this march is it was totally different than the rest of the war, as bloody and brutal and awful as it was.