Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes.

One reason to fashion a story is to lift a grudge.

Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.

The small family farm is dying; people's lives are being dislocated.

I don't know, it is a very quiet rebellion. [ ... ] I don't get angry. I sit quietly in the corner and say 'no'.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.

Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.

I never, ever talk about writing to anyone at all.

I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.

The way I see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally.

I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever.

Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.

With the accent, it's an internal dialogue that Southerners have with themselves. We kind of carry around that shame, that feeling of being inferior to the North. I think I did lose some of the accent for a while. Because when I was a graduate student, I was terrified at having to get up in front of a roomful of smart New York kids.

I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk.

I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines.

Reading can be just feeding, but smart reading takes us further. The classroom is one way to go deeper, but we can't stay in school forever.

I often say flippantly that the short story is ... shorter; you can be done with it more easily. It's much less of a commitment of time and energy than a big project like a novel or long nonfiction book.

Mary Lou suddenly realizes that Mack calls the temperature number because he is afraid to talk on the telephone, and by listening to a recording, he doesn't have to reply. It's his way of pretending that he's involved. He wants it to snow so he won't have to go outside. He is afraid of what might happen. But it occurs to her that what he must really be afraid of is women. Then Mary Lou feels so sick and heavy with her power over him that she wants to cry. She sees the way her husband is standing there in a frozen pose. Mack looks as though he could stand there all night with the telephone receiver against his ear.

The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama.

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.

I've always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that's being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.

Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better. I think my characters all want something better. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard ... The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees ... He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought.

It was a romantic dream to be a writer. It seemed like a calling.

In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.

My mother watched the skies at evening for a portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign.

I wanted to be somebody, go somewhere, do something with my life.

I have heard from many readers since 'The Girl in the Blue Beret' came out. The story of my airline pilot, former B-17 bomber pilot Marshall Stone, on his search to find the people who helped him during World War II has struck a chord.

I read many riveting escape-and-evade accounts of airmen and of the Resistance networks organized to hide them and then send them on grueling treks across the Pyrenees to safety. But it was the people I met in France and Belgium who made the period come alive for me. They had lived it.

I suppose the desire to go to town helped make me ambitious, and the allure of the worlds that came in over the radio also helped. But the rewards of growing up on a farm were far greater in many ways than life in town.

I grew up on popular music, and rock-and-roll expresses very deep feelings of those people who don't have a lot.

My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.

Bruce Springsteen's world is where everybody did these terrible jobs, if they had jobs at all, and he wanted something better.

Reading is so private, and it is often a reader's habit to finish a book, close the covers, and plunge into the next one without a backward glance.

I grew up on the precursors to rock and roll, rhythm and blues.

Most of the time I was in the Northeast, I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my material for writing.

'In Country' was also made into a film, which opened the story up to a broader audience.

It was important for me to understand who I am and where I came from. To get a hold on why I do certain things.

My father had all these great names for our cows. Bossy and Daisy and Petunia and Turnip. One of my jobs was to round up the cows before milking. I'd go out back with the dog and bring them in.

Some people will stay at home and be content there. Others are born to run. It's that conflict that fascinates me.