“The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.”

I’ve always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.

The most powerful words in English are, ‘Tell me a story.’

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature’s profligate generosity.

You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

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

Like everything else, love’s not worth much without some action to back it up.

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.

To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program.

There are plenty of difficult obstacles in your path. Don’t allow yourself to become one of them.

My goal is just to become a better comedian.

It has come with a great purpose, which I may not understand at the moment. But as I refuse to become panicky.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

Time always seems long to the child who is waiting – for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

The more you seek the uncomfortable, the more you will become comfortable.