Reynolds Price Quotations

I always say the late 60s, early 70s in American education were really exciting times to teach. The late 70s, on the other hand, were awfully dull. People tended to be quiet and repressed and all headed off to business school or something.

I said to one of my students a couple of years ago, what is it with you people? You never get off the phone to one another, you travel through whole continents to be with one another for 14 hours. And he said, Mr. Price, we had to invent families of our own, our own families disappeared.

Our mothers, our aunts, the grandmothers, the babysitters, and if you're a boy, and you're a sensitive boy, which theoretically novelists are supposed to be, you do subliminally pick up a great deal about female sensibility.

I think if we are realistic, the South - the old Confederate states - really only has one entirely unique feature that other parts of the country don't have, and that is this nearly 400-year history of tremendous intimacy, in every sense of the word, good and evil, between two very different kinds of peoples: people who were brought here against their wishes from Africa and a largely Anglo-white population.

What I still ask for daily - for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life

Everybody was there. A bachelor aunt or uncle. You would all come to the table, even some stone-deaf member of the family, usually the oldest ... and he would mumble something under his breath.

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women

The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.

The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.

I've met little meanness, wherever I went.

I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.

The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.

From the age of six I wanted to be an artist. At that point I meant a painter, but it turned out what I really meant was I was someone who was very interested in watching the world and making copies of it.

You have to realize that your work is done by your body, and if your body is in very bad health, it's not going to work for you no matter how young you are. So, I'm a bit of an athletic coach when it comes to trying to respect my body's needs and tendencies, and when I teach students, I try and persuade them of the same.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed

Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand.

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens-second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for.