What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took….

I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that'….

But she couldn't dismiss easily his light touch with her. No pushing or pressing, none of that herding and corralling bullshit, unlike any of her old….

Disease is nature's revenge for our destructiveness..

A lizard in the spring - hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly - go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground - ….

I've lived out West some... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska..

Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do..

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your mo….

What you have lost will not be returned to you; it always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go ….

That's just pain she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not the worst of it anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't ….

[No] matter what a waste one has made of one's life, it is ever possible to find some path to redemption, however partial..

And then she thought that you went on living one day after another, and in time you were somebody else, your previous self only like a close relative….

One time at the University of Colorado, at a faculty dinner, this professor said to me, 'Well, my goodness, a boy from Appa-lay-chee-a with a Ph.D!' ….

But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I'm dead and in a box in the dark d….

You never know when somebody will pull you to them..

Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consci….

While writing Cold Mountain, I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it….

The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations we….

I remember my father checking on a mountain kid who hadn't been coming to school. My father had this beautiful Harris tweed overcoat. He came back wi….

The past is a stronger influence in the South. But I think everywhere you have this sense that the world changes faster than you can accommodate your….

He had been alone in the world and empty for so long. But she filled him full, and so he believed everything that had been taken out of him might hav….