Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.

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

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

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

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

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

I learned that if I could read, I could cook. I surprised myself I like it.

Isn't it a shame military doctors couldn't be as good as military sunglasses?

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.

I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.

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

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

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

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

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.

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

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

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

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

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

I've always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

I was the only person in the world who thought it was a military duty to appear to be in a good mood.

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

Know this. I think you could be special if you only thought there was anything special about yourself.

I've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

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

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

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