Bobbie Ann Mason

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.”

“My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.”

“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.”

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

“I'm not very articulate. The reason I write is because I don't talk.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I never, ever talk about writing to anyone at all.”

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

“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.”

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