Zell Miller Quotes

The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers.

I had been to the South many times and I thought I knew what the South was, but not until you live with people and live through their lives do you know what it's really about.

Tennessee Williams knew about the South, but he would clean it up and lie about it.

I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they're still diverse.

I bring a lot of 'y'all' up to New York with me.

I grew up in the South, and I think there are lots of people who have distorted views of the South.

The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

I am proud of being a Southerner. I wasn't about to let Southerners on my show be stupid or aw-shuckses who just sit on the front porch and spit in the yard. I wasn't about to do that, and I made that very clear from the start. I was kind of the gate-keeper on that stuff.

I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

You know, I love the South.

There's something sort of intrinsic in being a Southerner that doesn't go away. You can't get rid of it, but it's not something that's terribly obvious.

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

There's something about Southern characters.

I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.

I was raised a proper Southern boy.

I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.

Folks in Alabama seem like folks in Georgia to me. I feel like you can just about combine the two.

I'm Southern to the bone.

I am southern - from the great state of South Carolina. They say, 'You can take the girl out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the girl.' And it's true.

I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.

I'd spent summers growing up in Mississippi, so I had an idea of what the South is like.

For one, the 'countryness' is pretty much in my blood. I'm from Georgia, down south. That voice just lives in me.

The movies I've made about the South, they were my experience and it's something that I know.