Love's action. It isn't talk and it never has been.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

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

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.

We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.