A biography for Bobbie Ann Masonhasn’t been written yet.
“'In Country' was also made into a film, which opened the story up to a broader audience.”
“Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.”
“I was very bookish and shy. I didn't have playmates, ever.”
“I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.”
“I was too shy to do anything but read, but there was nobody to tell me what to read.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.”
“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.”
“I read many riveting escape-and-evade accounts of airmen and of the Resistance networks organized to hide them and then send them on grueling treks across the Pyrenees to safety. But it was the people I met in France and Belgium who made the period come alive for me. They had lived it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I wanted to be somebody, go somewhere, do something with my life.”
“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.”
“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.”