Southern Writing Quotes

#1. I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

Kiese Laymon

#2. I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.

Natasha Trethewey

#3. For a director and a producer to be named on the writing credits is practically unheard of.

Terry Southern

#4. There are writers who pour out words, concepts that sound really important but that basically say nothing. I always tried to be as concise as possible, all to try and reach everyone, but especially the simple people, those who needed to be reached more than anyone else.

Chespirito

#5. The conflict each day is whether to immerse in books or writing. I can't do one without the other, but I can't do both at the same time. It is the writer's paradox.

Patricia Hickman

#6. The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, but for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among the most elite human activities: the province of monarchs, priests and nobles who reserved for themselves the privilege of lasting words.

Tom Chatfield

#7. Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Robert Morgan

#8. I learned not to care ... and to write for an imaginary reader whose tastes were similar to my own.

Terry Southern

#9. Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

Flannery O'Connor

#10. I don't know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can't print that.

Terry Southern

#11. Writing on a contract for a major studio you get the very best.

Terry Southern

#12. I was six when my parents divorced, and that was tough for me.

Andie MacDowell

#13. Most things are imaginary, when you think about it. Sometimes I think I'm imaginary.

Kiersten White

#14. So the intelligent use of power is to never interfere with anyone else's success. Use the power you get to just be more successful yourself.

Frederick Lenz

#15. In the last few months, she'd had a lot of time to consider the state of mankind, and she'd decided that people actually had very few choices in their lives. Most things happened to you. Most things rolled right over you and then kept on going.

Alice Hoffman

#16. Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

Saul Leiter

#17. Joy makes the longest journey too short.

John Wooden

#18. Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Flannery O'Connor

#19. When she says 'I've never done this before she just means with you

Josh Stern

#20. I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.

William S. Burroughs

#21. Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

Arnold Bennett

#22. I went to them without fear, child, prepared for a pitched battle, expecting the fierce Watchers, famed for their love of Earth, to defend their families. Yet they stood mute and allowed their loved ones to die. I judged them harshly in my heart for that.

Kirby Crow

#23. Say it with words. Show it with action.

Ron Kaufman

#24. Oh, southern rappers ... so hard to write a rhyme when you only know 30 words.

Daniel Tosh

#25. When I was little, I thought it was terribly romantic, being half stardust, half Southern magnolia.

Suzanne Palmieri

#26. Green is the new black: make the environment part of your personal brand.

Laura K. Ipsen

#27. Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood

Katherine Imogene Youngblood

#28. Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Robert Morgan

#29. 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

#30. Todd and Tim [Tobias] write the music, and I come up with the melodies and lyrics. I call it the Ohio Rock Factory. Tim and Todd run the northern plant in Cleveland, and I've got the southern plant down here in Dayton. No tours permitted.

Robert Pollard

#31. The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

Terry Southern

#32. Where am I and doing what? You might well ask. Freaky chick, you say? You can't imagine. I am priestess of a sandcastle in a land of dust and starlight.

Laini Taylor