Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

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.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.