Quotes from Bobbie Ann Mason

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

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

One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.

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

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

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.

He was hiding there in the dark when Dewey Phillips called the Presley house

He did so innocently, without intention or design.

Rather than making black music or white music or a white imitation of black music, he was making music that was the voice of the Southern poor—both black and white working-class groups. "In their indigence and low social

Elvis's fame happened to him—not entirely unbidden, but in proportions he had not imagined or sought. He was a dreamer, aspiring to stardom. He wanted to be big.

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 rejected the traditional notion of 'women's work,' but I never thought of my early ambitions in a feminist way, exactly. Primarily I rebelled against apathy and limited education. I was rejecting a whole way of life that I thought trapped everyone.

I grew up 150-200 miles from any city. You simply didn't have much connection with the outside world. So my dreams were always to get out. It's a familiar kind of thing, I think, for anybody in a small town.

In the country in Kentucky, people are just amazed that anybody in New York wants to read about their lives.

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.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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