My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

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

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

A story untold could be the one that kills you.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.