We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

You know, Southerners are pretty cool.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

I am proud to be a Southerner. I think Southern hospitality is very... I don't think it's just a term. I think it really exists. You can come to Savannah, and the people are so sweet and so nice.

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.

Any Southerner is spoiled when it comes to food.

I came from a big family... a big family of Southerners.

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast.

I'm a Southerner - I never take satisfaction in touching a nerve.

But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

I'm a Southerner. We dream of having the family and the kids, and the parents want grandkids, that's all they care about, give me some grandbabies.

Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

Southerners have never been afraid of seasoning. It's kind of the other way around; our seasoning is afraid of us.

Stone-ground grits are wonderful, but because they take so long to cook, I usually go with quick cooking grits - which I also love. But I never make the instant kind - some things a Southerner just won't do!

To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.

I'm a Southerner.