In memory everything seems to happen to music.

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that's true of everyone, don't you?

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles.

I met her last summer on a moonlight boat trip.

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.