William Jay Smith Quotes

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

The first story I ever sold was to 'Argosy' magazine, which no longer exists. That issue also contained work by several other more celebrated writers, like Ray Bradbury - so I felt I had at least one toe on the ladder.

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.

I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

When you're from the East Coast or you're from the South, people expect you to sound a certain way. So if you don't sound that way, people won't label you as that type of artist. For me, I had a whole new lane to create for myself being from Pittsburgh and being a Midwest artist.

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.

Tennessee Williams knew about the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it.

Why can I write 'South' with some assurance that you'll know I mean Richmond and don't mean Phoenix? What is it that the South's boundaries enclose?

If you ask me what am I, I might say 'I am a Californian,' and if George Bush were here, he would say 'I am a Texan.'

Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.

I kind of want to be seen as an American writer, not just a New York writer.

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

As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.

Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

I like the South: Southern literature and that relationship between grotesqueness and living below the Mason-Dixon line. But I also understand that people view it as a limitation - as an actor and as a person - perceptions that are really wrong: that you are ignorant and possibly illiterate, or that it's cute.

I was born in New Hampshire, moved to Tennessee when I was 9, and lived there through high school, then went to school at College of Charleston, so definitely a lot of pieces of the South there.

I think people in the north and the south and the east and the west, anywhere they come from, are just as interesting, and they're humans. They have the same realm of emotions that we all have. But I'm just more drawn to the Southern character and the different types, and Southern literature is so lyrical and so wonderful.

I'm nuts about the South - the people, the language, the food, the land, the stories and writers that come from there - but it's hard to know whether I'll use it as a location again.

I'm from the 805, man. I don't have to talk about where I'm from, but I'm tough.

I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.

There's a view of Montana writing that seems stage-managed by the Chamber of Commerce - it's all about writers like A. B. Guthrie and Ivan Doig. It used to bother me that nobody had a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza.

Individuals in the South are just like individuals any place else.