When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

Of all the passions of mankind, the love of novelty most rules the mind. In search of this, from realm to realm we roam. Our fleets come loaded with every folly home.

I ran into Ku Klux Klan and the threat of hurricanes, and those two things made me decide not to build on the Alabama coast, so we came back to Memphis.

I took five years on the first volume, five years on the second volume, and ten years on the third volume.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

I never cared what kind of grade I got.

Longevity conquers scandal every time.

But the same thing was true in the army. You slept in a barracks with all kinds of people of every nationality, every trade, every character and quality you can imagine, and that was a good experience.

Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.

I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

And I really do think that the difficulty of research makes it more real to you than punching a thing to find out how many men were killed at this particular action.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

Shiloh is a wonderfully dramatic battle. The leader of one side is killed, and the other one is going on to glory, and it was the first great battle. It lasted two days.

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

Well fight them sir til hell freezes over and then sir we will fight them on the ice.

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being and it was a hell of a crossroads.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. The library is the university.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

In a very alert and bright state of society people learn co-operation by themselves, but in older and quieter conditions of laboring enterprise, such a bill as I propose will point out the way to mutual exertion.

We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.

The belief that the good in American society will finally win out... I don't believe any more.

I'm about to become a member of the Chemists Society of America. I'm very proud of that.

I am as frustrated with society as a pyromaniac in a petrified forest.

But most Canadians have recognized to a greater or lesser extent that despite much of the so-called progress of the affluent society, essential ingredients to a meaningful life seem to be either entirely lacking, or at best, difficult to grasp.

It is the tendency of the social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.

Alabama citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, respect and value the meaning of decency, and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of diminution of personality.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.

These interests of the workers, as the exploited and oppressed, class of society, are the same in all countries.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

If more people were actively engaged in advocating their positions I think we'd have a better society.

The transfer is a monumental occasion as the Iraqi people take control of their government and their future and forge ahead with creating a society governed by the tenets of life, liberty and freedom.

Australia has an increasingly multicultural society.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

Friendship! Mysterious cement of the soul, Sweet'ner of life, and solder of society.

Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.

Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.