When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year..

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it..

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, th….

Writing has never been that simple for me..

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness..

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died….

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and not….

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and sh….

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a….

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk..

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself..

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into ….

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism..

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of t….

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mis….

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of lan….

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue..

Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks..

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts..

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization..

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself..