I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

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.

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

I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being sometimes.

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.

I have a theory that Southern madhouses are full of gifted women who were stifled.