Quotes from Bobbie Ann Mason

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

We had a cistern for water. My grandmother churned butter and made lye soap. She and my mother did the washing in a wash kettle outdoors, using a fire to heat the water. That's the way they did the wash until the 1950s.

When I was growing up on our 53-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food; it was the center of our lives. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it - endlessly, day after day, season after season.

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 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.

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

You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.

Mama was a natural cook. At harvest time, she would whip up a noontime dinner for the men in the field: fried chicken with milk gravy, ham, mashed potatoes, lima beans, field peas, corn, slaw, sliced tomatoes, fried apples, biscuits, and peach pie.

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.

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

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

Sometimes a book I'm reading is so terrific that when I finish, I simply turn back to page one and start all over again to see what I've missed, to experience it again, more deeply, or because I don't want to let it go.

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

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.

Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

During the Cold War, workers proudly contributed to national defense, but the carelessness and haste in handling toxic waste created a nightmare of pollution for subsequent generations.

Writers want to be reread. They want to think that their words don't just flash by but deserve some reflection.

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.

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