Antebellum South Quotes

So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.

If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.

My style is not specific to the antebellum South, but it's heavily inspired by the Jim Crow era.

I shall play Scarlett O'Hara.

Right before The Civil War, only 8% of white people owned slaves. Some plantations would have hundreds and hundreds of slaves, but the vast majority of whites didn't have any.

I grew up in Georgia and I think if you're raised in the South it's where a lot of the war was fought, and it's just more present in the sort of psyche of the South. So I've always just been interested and sort of fascinated by [Civil War].

When people say what is 'Gone With the Wind' about, they say it's a love story between Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara. But Mammy is almost a third party.

I'll be like Scarlett O'Hara-I'll think about it tomorrow.

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

Like many people who live in the South, I'm drawn to the history of the Civil War.

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

I felt no obligation to bow to any 21st Century political correctness. What I did feel an obligation to do was to take the 21stCentury viewers and physically transport them back to the ante bellum South in 1858, in Mississippi, and have them look at America for what it was back then. And I wanted it to be shocking.

Scarlett O'Hara is going to be a thankless and difficult role. The part I'd like to play is Rhett Butler.

If I watch 'Gone With the Wind,' I always find it interesting. I think, 'What's going to happen next? What's that character going to do?' But you know, you never really need to watch the films you made again. They stay inside you, always with you.

The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words.

I really don't know why Scarlett has such appeal. When I began writing the sequel, I had a lot of trouble because Scarlett is not my kind of person. She's virtually illiterate, has no taste, never learns from her mistakes.