In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice.

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.