Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

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

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

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.