Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

I have found human nature a bit contradictory in my living of it. Human life is incredibly strange.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.

I never read my reviews... not even the good ones. Barbra Streisand once told me, if just one person in the audience doesn't applaud, it bothers her. I'm the same way. I'd be devastated to read that someone didn't like my work.

I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.

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've never cackled with laughter at a single line I've ever written. None of it has given me pleasure.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

My great fear of being attacked or trivialized by my contemporaries made me concentrate on what I was trying to do as a writer. It forced me to draw some conclusions that were my own.

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

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

Though Nathalie Dupree did not remember much about my presence in her class, it marked me forever. I remain her enthusiast, her evangelist, her acolyte, and her grateful student. She taught me that cooking and storytelling make the most delightful coconspirators.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.

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

You get a little moody sometimes but I think thats because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

A breeze lifted off the ocean and several hundred notes from the wind chimes tinkled like ice shaken in silver cups. They altered the mood of the forest the way an orchestra does a theater when it begins tuning up its instruments.

Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.

There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

Fantasy is one of the souls brighter porcelains.

Happiness is an accident of nature a beautiful and flawless aberration.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

Honor is the presence of God in man.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends. The mind can never break off from the journey.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

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

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

A story untold could be the one that kills you.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

There's no word in the language I revere more than 'teacher.' My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I've honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Once you have travelled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

Violence send deep roots into the heart, it has no seasons, it is always ripe, evergreen.

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?