The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
Professional Southerners sicken me.
My mom's mother was from Virginia, but I don't feel much of a tie. I'm very much anti-South for many, many reasons. Whenever I go down there, people are always looking at me funny, you know.
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.
I liked 'The Help,' and I love Viola Davis. But I didn't think that film was a great film; I thought that was a very uneven film. I thought the Southern women were so caricatured that it was kind of like 'Harper Valley PTA' or something like that.
I am proud of being a Southerner. I wasn't about to let Southerners on my show be stupid or aw-shuckses who just sit on the front porch and spit in the yard. I wasn't about to do that, and I made that very clear from the start. I was kind of the gate-keeper on that stuff.
I grew up in the South, and I think there are lots of people who have distorted views of the South.
Being a Southerner, I'm interested in sex, violence, religion and all the things that make life interesting.
You might be a redneck if you work with a shirt off... and so does your husband.
You might be a redneck if your momma tore her best dress coon hunting.
You might be a redneck if your handkerchief doubles as your shirt sleeve.
I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they're still diverse.
I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash.
Because I was single, there was a chance I was a homosexual. Because I went to Syracuse, wherever that was, then I was probably a Communist. Or worse, a Liberal. Because I was from Memphis, I was a subversive intent on embarrassing Ford County.
I think that often times Hollywood panders to the cliches of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite.
Everyone thinks because you're from the south you know everyone down there, but it's not like that; I never knew nothing about no Mississippi.
A lot of people up North, they think everybody from the South is married to their sister and has seen a UFO. I told them, 'I'm just dating my sister and couldn't swear that it wasn't a weather balloon.'
I think of myself as a Hollywood hillbilly, but I'm sick of all these questions people ask about Alabama. 'Do you have an outhouse?' 'Is there a lot of inbreeding in your family?' They think all Southerners don't have computers and TV sets and that we're all still living in 1862.
You might be a redneck if you think the Mountain Men in Deliverance were just misunderstood.
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.
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.
You might be a redneck if you think people that send out graduation announcements are show-offs.
Tennessee Williams knew about the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it.
I grew up with a cabin so we'd always go out and hunt and fish and all that good stuff. All of the cliche Southern things one would imagine.
Howard Dean knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about Sunday.
