“Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.”

Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak-and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence.

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

Anyone can have a good day, but you have to be able to perform on a bad day.

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something – anything I had done – than anyone else I know.

Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

Anyone who doesn’t feel the crosses simply doesn’t get that country.

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.

I would never do a commercial if I thought it was offensive to anyone.

I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?