"It's politics . . . It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean."

"Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure."

"The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself."

"She had a grocer's faith in books, they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts."

"The water was pure and cold and came out of the Apennines tasting like snow melted in the hands of a pretty girl."

"I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them."

"These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart."

"Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny."

"I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta."

"Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling."

"Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air."

"The body's a funny thing. It's so full of surprises that it makes conventional wisdom seem silly."

"I do not think I was a hotheadnot then and not now. I thought I was right. I had read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible. Segregation seemed evil from the time I was a boy. Slavery is an abomination on the American soul, ineradicable stain on our body politic. But Penn Center lit a fire that has never gone out, and the election of President Barack Obama was one of the happiest days of my life."

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

"I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy."

"Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else."

"There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town's consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit's harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. That's the Southern way my grandmother said. That's the nice way."

"A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out."

"Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear."

"My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that."

"The narrator welcomes new students to his school by offering to tell them who the easy teachers are, or who the good ones are."

"I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little."

"Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that's me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills."

"I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation."

"It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils. Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks."

"But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention."

"it had been a winter of deadening seriousness, when all the illusions and bright dreams of my early twenties had withered and died. I did not yet have the interior resources to dream new dreams; I was far too busy mourning the death of the old ones and wondering how I was to survive without them. I was sure I could replace them somehow , but was not sure I could restore their brassy luster or dazzling impress ."

"Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance."

"You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves."

"The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man."

"If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me."

"Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent."

"A nation of unhappy teachers makes for a sadder and more endangered America."

"Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains."

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

"Conroy writes that, while part of him was following the basketball game from the bench, "the other part, an embassy of a completely sovereign nation, would fling its doors open to the most authentic part of me."

"When we cuss each other out, call each other the vilest names on earth, and put each other down with thoughtless cruelty, it is the only way we know and the only language we have to express our ardent love for each other."

"The choices I didn't make are almost as ruinous as the ones I did."

"I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean."

"There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art."

"A family is one of nature's solubles, it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater."

"Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth."

"Help them, but don't make friends with them."

"There was always a grandeur and a nobility in my megalomania. And also something cheap and loathsome that I could not help."

"The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man."

"It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief."

"Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all."

"As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible."

"A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she's tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life."

"I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell."