Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes
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I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.
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Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.
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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.
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My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.
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In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
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I never, ever talk about writing to anyone at all.
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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.
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The small family farm is dying; people's lives are being dislocated.
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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.
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Some people will stay at home and be content there. Others are born to run. It's that conflict that fascinates me.
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I grew up on popular music, and rock-and-roll expresses very deep feelings of those people who don't have a lot.
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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.
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It was a romantic dream to be a writer. It seemed like a calling.
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I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever.
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Working with food was fraught with anxiety when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and we lived in fear of crop failure.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I wanted to be somebody, go somewhere, do something with my life.
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In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.
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Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.