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

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with...

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: “introit,” “offertory,” “liturgy,” “movable feast,” “the minor elevation,” “the lavabo,” “the apparition of Lourdes,” and hundreds more....

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year’s time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding....

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God...

The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.

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...

The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you...

Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, “the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part...

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

Great romantics are granted lots of slack.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

I was born in the age of “alas”.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If...

Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There’s not enough time.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond...

We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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