Carson McCullers and Terence

Carson wrote in her essay "The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing":

I am so immersed in them that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton [the protagonist in Reflections in a Golden Eye], I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, "Nothing human is alien to me."

--Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, The University of Georgia Press, 1975, page 90.