“Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.”

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship.

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.

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 when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.

We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.