“A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.”

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.

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

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.

I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

I do not have any other way of saying it. I think it happens but once and only to the very young when it feels like your skin could ignite at the mere touch of another person. You get to love like that but once.

If we just had more revelation of what we already have, there would be far less prayers and far more praise.

There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl got mad at these guys who were talking behind us.

I can’t handle the paparazzi. They’re everywhere. One of them was in a dumpster trying to take my photo the other day. It was crazy!

I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.

You can act in five, six, or seven films in the time it takes to direct one film.

To lose one’s health renders science null, are inglorious, strength unavailing, wealth useless, and eloquence powerless.

All excesses are inimical to Nature. It is safer to proceed a little at a time, especially when changing from one regimen to another.

I always want to wear clothes that my children will one day look back on and say, ‘Oh, you looked amazing – why didn’t you keep that?’ Not, ‘Oh my God – I can’t believe you wore that.’