“She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.”

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.

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 had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

If I could have pushed hard and attacked. But then I would have had a good chance of making a mistake.

We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.

As I ran for president, I hoped that one child would come out of the ghetto like I did, could look at me walk across the stage with governors and senators and know they didn’t have to be a drug dealer.

I could come home from school and just watch it all day. It just interested me.

Trapnest means “The Trapped Den” Once we enter it, we can’t get out by our own means I thought that that name could only come from a man who love having power over other.

I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I’m alone, and I can just use it when I want.