Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.
The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl.
Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.
We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.
In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution that come from a permanent sense of estrangement.
Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have.
Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks.
Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.
I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'
She had awakened something in him that had slumbered far too long. Not only did he feel passion, he felt the return of hope.
I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.
But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.
I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.
Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.
A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.
It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.
Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.
When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.
Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.
I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.
I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.
I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules.
She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course.
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.
I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.
We've pretended too much in our family, Luke, and hidden far too much. I think we're all going to pay a high price for our inability to face the truth.
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.
Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.
From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.
These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.
The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.
When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.
Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.
I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.
I don’t know why it is that I have always been happier thinking of somewhere I have been or wanted to go, than where I am at the time. I find it difficult to be happy in the present.
My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.
Good writing ... 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.
She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
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 place much safer than home.
Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.
I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with 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 through leaves.
Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don't think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth.