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

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.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

Everybody in the Middle East wants to explain why they’re right.

If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.

I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,

And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.

Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.

[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.

So how can one explain that we are today investigating an action our country should be proud of?.

The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity.