Willie Morris Quotations

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

When I started driving our old four-door green DeSoto, I always took Skip on my trips around town. I would get Skip to prop himself against the steering wheel, his black head peering out of the windshield, while I crouched out of sight under the dashboard. Slowing the car to ten or fifteen, I would guide the steering wheel with my right hand while Skip, with his paws, kept it steady. As we drove by the Blue Front Café, I could hear one of the men shout: "Look at that ol' dog drivin' a car!"

I can think of no one more qualified to write about the modern South than Curtis Wilkie

The Halifax area has long played a major role in Canada's military operations, being the port of departure for convoys, naval task forces and army units over the past 100 years or so.

It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.

My mother's people, the people who captured my imagination when I was growing up, were of the Deep South - emotional, changeable, touched with charisma and given to histrionic flourishes. They were courageous under tension and unexpectedly tough beneath their wild eccentricities, for they had and unusually close working agreement with God. They also had an unusually high quota of bullshit.

He must always be a stranger to the place he loves, and its people.

His claim to his home is deep, but there are too many ghosts. He must absorb without being absorbed.

It was Bill, ... who pushed Willie to go to New York.