The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

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.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

Writing has never been that simple for me.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.