“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.”

The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.

Faulkner didn’t know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it’s necessary

One does not know where love will take you.

Silence (can) be the most eloquent form of lying.

There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.

My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.

Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.

Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.

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

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

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.

One must learn to forgive and not to hold a hostile, bitter attitude of mind, which offends those about us and prevents us from enjoying ourselves; one must recognize human shortcomings and adjust himself to them rather than to be constantly finding fault with them.

Learn to say ‘I don’t know.’ If used when appropriate, it will be often.

Every day, I wake up eager to learn new things, and I am grateful to Mourinho for that.

I learned a valuable lesson that nothing is ever guaranteed.

You will never grow if you can’t admit your wrongs and learn from your mistakes.

Tis necessary for thee to learn all things, both the abiding essence of persuasive truth, and men’s opinions in which rests no true belief.

Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all.

If an ignorant person is attracted by the things of the world, that is bad. But if a learned person is thus attracted, it is worse.