"Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing."

"From the beginning, I've told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I'm the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel."

"Great romantics are granted lots of slack."

"Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them."

"I was born in the age of "alas"."

"My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadelthe whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me."

"What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts"

"Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy."

"I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves."

"A man's only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up."

"Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers."

"When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children"

"The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered."

"I loved these salt rivers more than I loved the sea; I loved the movement of tides more than I loved the fury of surf. Something in me was congruent with this land, something affirmed when I witnessed the startled, piping rush of shrimp or the flash of starlight on the scales of mullet. I could feel myself relax and change whenever I returned to the lowcountry and saw the vast green expanses of marsh, feminine as lace, delicate as calligraphy. The lowcountry had its own special ache and sting."

"If any writer in this country has collected as fine and passionate a group of readers as I have, they're fortunate and lucky beyond anyone's imagination. It remains a shock to me that I've had a successful writing career. Not someone like me; Lord, there were too many forces working against me, too many dark currents pushing against me, but it somehow worked. Though I wish I'd written a lot more, been bolder with my talent, more forgiving of my weaknesses, I've managed to draw a magic audience into my circle. They come to my signings to tell me stories, their stories. The ones that have hurt them and made their nights long and their lives harder."

"You must appreciate beauty for it to endure."

"Honor is the presence of God in man."

"I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language."

"Without music, life is a journey through a desert."

"Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law."

"I envy the tireless intimacy of women's friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength."

"He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart."

"Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself."

"I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told."

"I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me."

"Wasn't Atlanta the murder capital of the U.S. last year?" "Yes, but the airport's perfectly safe."

"Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide."

"In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game."

"The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story."

"You have to pay for this view (onto which he looks while writing), so our expenses keep us pretty motivated to write. It's a vicious cycle."

"I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'"

"I don't know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit."

"You're going to act like a happy man. I know, I know. It's the hardest role in the world."

"When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, "Is this necessary at this point in the book?"

"The teachers of my life saved my life and sent me out prepared for whatever life I was meant to lead. Like everyone else, I had some bad ones and mediocre ones, but I never had one that I thought was holding me back because of idleness or thoughtlessness. They spent their lives with the likes of me and I felt safe during the time they spent with me. The best of them made me want to be just like them. I wanted young kids to look at me the way I looked at the teachers who loved me. Loving them was not difficult for a boy like me. They lit a path for me, and one that I followed with joy."

"It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters."

"Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation"

"In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice."

"My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself."

"Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics."

"I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class"

"Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood."

"As time passed from solstice to mild solstice in those occluded zones of my early childhood, I played beneath the distracted majesty of my mother's blue-eyed gaze. With her eyes on me I felt as if I were being studied by flowers."

"I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don't mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home."

"Throughout my career I've lived in constant fear that I wouldn't be good enough, that I'd have nothing to say, that I'd be laughed at, humiliatedand I'm old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I'll ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I'm supposed to writethe grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don't quite know it. But I trust I'll begin to know it soon."

"Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life."

"We had made the error of staying small and there is no more unforgivable crime in America."

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

"I was a watchful boy being raised by a father I didn't admire. In a desperate way, I needed the guidance of someone who could show me another way of becoming a man. It was sometime during the year when I decided I would become the kind of man that Bill Dufford was born to be. I wanted to be the type of man that a whole town could respect and honor and fall in love withthe way Beaufort did when Bill Dufford came to town to teach and shape and turn its children into the best citizens they could be."

"I've written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all meanssome kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they've been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort."