I thought I'd stumbled onto Pluto. What I did not realize, I had stumbled into the great lie. They were separate but there was no equality whatsoever.

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

The genius of the (original) novel is they were the mother and father of what Atlanta was going to become, ... Would I have written a better novel than Margaret Mitchell? Hell no.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to sister

Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.