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.