Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

Author Image

Bobbie Ann Mason

Profession : Novelist

Birth : May 1, 1940

I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire.

Bobbie Ann Mason

'In Country' was also made into a film, which opened the story up to a broader audience.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

In the 1980s, Vietnam emerged in our culture as a legitimate and compelling topic for discussion rather than something to be hidden in shame.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason

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

Bobbie Ann Mason

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.

Bobbie Ann Mason