Michael McDowell Quotes

#1. Benjamin Stallworth understood his shortcomings and was rendered unhappy by that understanding. He was upright enough to wish for correction but too weak to enforce it upon himself.

Michael McDowell

#2. Grace began to understand. "I have friends," she protested. "I have Zaddie."

"Zaddie is just a little colored girl," Mary-Love pointed out. "It's all right to play with Zaddie, but she's not your real friend. John Robert can be your real little friend.

Michael McDowell

#3. I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, "I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.

Michael McDowell

#4. Alcoholism is a disease," she said. "Like athlete's foot. Or herpes. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Luker and I have lots of friends who are alcoholics. And speed freaks too." "Well,

Michael McDowell

#5. She had got beyond despair.

Michael McDowell

#6. Merle Weaver stroked the little girl's hair and thought of the two corpses in the rear of the truck.

Michael McDowell

#7. Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.

Michael McDowell

#8. She's got manners, but what has she got in the way of morals?" "Oh," said Luker blithely, "she and I don't have any morals. We have to get along with a scruple or two." "I

Michael McDowell

#9. To have a family is real strange," said India thoughtfully. "All these people you wouldn't have anything to do with except that they're related to you.

Michael McDowell

#10. I sort of wish that was what happened though, Ginny, because that would mean the girl is all right. Fourteen-year-old girls have run off before."

Ginny eyed the sheriff severely. "Not fourteen-year-old girls who had grandmas like Evelyn Larkin.

Michael McDowell

#11. Mary-Love liked to see herself as the family cornucopia, dispensing all manner of good things, unstintingly, unceasingly. She considered herself amply rewarded by her children's gratitude, and if she perceived that her children were not sufficiently grateful, she could make something of that, too.

Michael McDowell

#12. And among adults, adultery is an unmentionable thing, which only occurs in the Bible and in Mobile.

Michael McDowell

#13. They placed the board between them on the kitchen table, and Becca took the suddenly inspired precaution of sprinkling the planchette with holy water taken from a bottle in the pantry placed next to the vanilla extract.

Michael McDowell

#14. In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.

Michael McDowell

#15. Savage mothers eat their children!

Michael McDowell

#16. I am a commercial writer and I'm proud of that. I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.

Michael McDowell