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.

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I...

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

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, “had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to...

Fantasy is one of the soul’s brighter porcelains.

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

When friends come to Rome in early summer to visit me I like to take them to the Pantheon during thunderstorms and stand them beneath the opening of the feathery, perfectly proportioned dome as rain...

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn’t know he was Ernest...

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

One must always forgive another’s passion.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

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...