“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”
“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.”
“Graham is as Southern as black-eyed peas, scuppernong wine, she-crab soup, Crimson Tide tailgating and a dog with ticks. She is so relentlessly Southern she makes me feel that I was born in Minnesota!”
“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.”
“Local people seemed very angry for a very long time. It was extraordinary backlash. I was called a liar, I was called every(thing) else. It was enough of a backlash that I moved to Atlanta.”