Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

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.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

Of the Yamacraw children, I can say little. I don't think I changed the quality of their lives significantly or altered the inexorable fact that they were imprisoned by the very circumstance of their birth.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.