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.

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

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.

My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory.

We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, "Oh, Mama, do it again!" And I had my earliest memory.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.