Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.
There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.
Every woman I had ever met who walked through the world appraised and classified by an extraordinary physicality had also received the keys to an unbearable solitude. It was the coefficient of their beauty, the price they had to pay.
Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.
From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
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.
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children.
I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it.
There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.
The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
College was to teach me that I was one of life’s journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.
Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.
It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me.
My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of an indrawn tide.
Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.
Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.
I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole.
Writing has never been that simple for me.
Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance.
Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends.