What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

Even now, after whatever gains feminism has made in involving fathers in the rearing of their children, I still think virtually all of us spend the most formative years of our lives very much in the presence of women

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.