Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.

I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

One day, it just dawned on me that I'm from Texas, and that's what I am.

I come from Texas, and my grandmother and mother were born in Arkansas.

I'm glad I'm Southern. I'm the Southerner who's very Southern in that she left to move to New York.

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'm Southern to the bone.

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.

You know, I'm from the South, and I wasn't interested in perpetuating a stereotypical southern character.

Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners.

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.

In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from.

I grew up in Louisiana - a little suburb right outside of New Orleans - and I wouldn't have it any other way!

There's no such thing as being too Southern.

It's the South that maintains the idea that they're different, which is interesting because nobody else really cares.

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.

My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.

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.

I'm not West Coast at all. I was born in Atlanta, but I grew up in Kentucky, outside of Lexington, in Winchester.

I moved from Kentucky to Miramar, Florida, at about 8. I think I was in second grade. I still had my Southern accent, and down there, you got to experience a melting pot in full fury. All the kids I hung out with were, like, Sicilian kids from Jersey and New York.

There's something sort of intrinsic in being a Southerner that doesn't go away. You can't get rid of it, but it's not something that's terribly obvious.

To be in the South in my first big job was very nostalgic. There is an energy to the way we do things in the South.