“The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.”

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

Love’s action. It isn’t talk and it never has been.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

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.

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

There are also so many emotional aspects to money – feelings of inadequacy, feelings of security. I am not sure if there needs to be more about money in fiction, but the absence of this aspect can make a story feel somehow frictionless and unreal.

A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.

I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

Learning about all these elements and aspects of her was mind-blowing and educational for me as a woman because I have to sometimes remind people that have known me for years.

Everyone’s just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it’s a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

Maybe I’m just a freak of nature, but I like every aspect of touring. I like it when you play amazing shows and everyone’s in high spirits, I like hating everything and wanting to be alone, I like the days that are boring and there’s nothing to do, I love the time wasted. I love everything about it.

You’re sort of forced to include this aspect of culture into your life whether it be for social reasons or business purposes.

You have 37.2 trillion cells in your body. There is vastness outside you and vastness inside you. You are connected to this mystery, you are a microcosm of the universe, and every aspect of your life benefits from the universe’s provision.