I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston.

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.

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

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

Anger is its own excuse and its own reward.

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 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.