I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.

Perhaps the most important thing we can ever do in our lives is find a way to keep the wild-both the wild inside and the wild outside us-and tap into it.

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness.

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.

Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water.

I don't know if I would do sequels. I almost feel like when I'm done with them, they're going to have to find their own way.

It's unimaginable to me that I wouldn't write, but it's very imaginable that I won't write for a little while.