No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

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

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.

In families, there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

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