Natasha Trethewey Quotes

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.

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

The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers.

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

I had been to the South many times and I thought I knew what the South was, but not until you live with people and live through their lives do you know what it's really about.

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.

Like every Southern writer, I thought that I needed to write the next 'Gone With the Wind.'

I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they're still diverse.

I grew up in the South, and I think there are lots of people who have distorted views of the South.

The South is one of those kingdoms of the mind, like India or Scotland, that are neat and understandable only to people who have never been there.

I think we typically, as Northerners, stereotype what the South is in so many negative ways. We kind of forget all the beautiful things that they contribute to make this country a country.

Anything to do with the South resonates with me, because I'm Southern.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner.

I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay.

I feel like if you're a girl in the South, you know 'Gone with the Wind' better than anything. Scarlett O'Hara is such a quintessential Southern woman.

You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

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

Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.

I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.

I'm really drawn to comedy. I grew up in the South, so I'm drawn to all things southern, so my role in 'Getting On' has been fun for me to play something southern - I always feel like I understand those characters more because of where I was raised.

Faulkner is a really important figure in southern literature. I wrestle with him and his legacy every time I sit down and write a piece of fiction.

Biblical myth is as integral to the spirit of the South as the heat and humidity.

I am southern - from the great state of South Carolina. They say, 'You can take the girl out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the girl.' And it's true.