Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.

Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

Still when I lost her, I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.

There's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought.