He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.

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

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.