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

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

In family matters you can get over anything. That’s one thing you’ll learn as an adult. There’s a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You’d never think of forgiving...

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a...

There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like...

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

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

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

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

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

She understood the nature of sin and knew that its most volatile form was the kind that did not recognize itself.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals...

The most powerful words in English are, “Tell me a story.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

We had made the error of staying small – and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation...

I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer,...

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

i was delighted I had offended her upholstered sensibilities.

The body’s a funny thing. It’s so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly.

it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams;...

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.

What’s important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will...

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

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved.

He lived out his whole life as an anthem to the pleasures of a bad mood.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

A portion of guilt is standard issue for southern boys; our whole lives are convoluted, egregious apologies to our mothers because our fathers have made us such flawed husbands.

I’ve always admired people who give accurate directions, and the tribe is small.

I can forgive almost any crime if a great story is left in its wake.