The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

Like everything else, love's not worth much without some action to back it up.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

I don't believe in happy families.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.