The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.
The most powerful words in English are, Tell me a story.
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. In dazz...
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 this point in the bo...
Carolina beach music, Dupree said, coming up on the porch. The holiest sound on earth.
I was born in the age of alas.
We began our life together at a moment of natural self-pity and defeat that left an inimitable impression on both of us. The rejection chastened me and let me know my proper place in the grand scheme...
Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.
A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.
Honor is the presence of God in man.
…Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak—and then as quic...
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' s...
Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.
The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.
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 from the books they carve from...
Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-...
Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.
Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.