I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was….

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win..

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better..

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart..

It is the secret life that sustains me now, and as I reach the top of that bridge I say it in a whisper, I say it as a prayer, as regret, and as prai….

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl..

Without music, life is a journey through a desert..

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake..

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with a divine pleasure. You read them and they fa….

My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood..

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood..

I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it diff….

Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been..

Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a t….

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering int….

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing..

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for….

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams..

Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don't think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they….

I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee..