My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wind' as the central book in her life, and made it the central book in her family.

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

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

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.