"This story is a good deal better than some of the ones in the current Martha Foley collection that I have been reading. I hesitate to say anything is wrong with the structure of it..."

"I'll be interested to see what Mr. Ransom thinks of as [sic] 'hick talk.' I have always listened with profit to what he has had to say about my stories..."

"My thoughts on this story of tentative. I think it wonderfully imaginative. It's a wonderful idea having the old woman think the devil is taking over. What chiefly worried m when I read it the first time was the occasional mannered use of the language..."

"...The surest way to kill off the short story is to say it's a woman's art..."

"...I suppose my novel too will be called another Southern ethic. I have an idiot in it. I wish I could do it, without the idiot but the idiot is necessary. In any case it's a very nice unobjectionable idiot..."

"...I have worked some more on the Birmingham talk because it doesn't really suit me but I am too sick of it to do much with it. I mean universal religion as opposed to sect, the catholic as opposed to the parochial..."

"Thanks for the clippings. No one there sent them to me so I wouldn't have seen them otherwise. I don’t exactly remember telling the lady the writer didn't need inspiration. At interviews I always feel like a dry cow being milked. There is no telling what they will get out of you..."

"I've like each one better than the last but this is absolutely the best. It is inconceivable to me that a story this good will remain unpublished..."

"I told you Eudora Welty was coming to the University of Chicago this year. She isn't. I am. Her brother got sick and they called me up and asked me to take her place and I foolishly accepted..."

"...I read my novel over and decided it isn't finished. False alarm. If I live through this Chicago episode, I shall reapproah [sic] it at my leisure..."