You’re going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It’s the hardest role in the world.

As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother’s blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as...

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.

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...

Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the...

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and...

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging...

You must appreciate beauty for it to endure.

In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You...

Here’s what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full...

He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.

I had declared in public my desire to be a writer … I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in...

Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.

I have built a city from the books I’ve read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city...

Help them, but don’t make friends with them.

Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.

Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

Later, long after my grandfather was dead, I would regret that I could never be the kind of man that he was. Though I adored him as a child and found myself attracted to the...

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I’d rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire...

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

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

She had a grocer’s faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

That’s the nice way.

It would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are.

Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and...

The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor...

Mansions were forming like jewels in my bloodstream.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning...

There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one’s existence a minor work of art.

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

College was to teach me that I was one of life’s journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell’s ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a...

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...

You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It’s a vicious cycle.

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

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

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

When you write by hand, you don’t have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, “Is this necessary at...

A man’s only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.

Chad seemed both venomous and insecure, a flammable combination.

It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed,...

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.