...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

Craziness attacks the softest eyes and hamstrings the gentlest flanks.

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.