My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory.

Baseball fans love numbers. They love to swirl them around their mouths like Bordeaux wine.

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

Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.

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

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.