My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.
We children sat transfixed before that moon our mother had called forth from the waters. When the moon had reached its deepest silver, my sister, Savannah, though only three, cried aloud to our mother, to Luke and me, to the river and the moon, “Oh, Mama, do it again!” And I had my earliest memory.
A recipe is a story that ends with a good meal.
A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.
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.
Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave.
Humanity is best described as inhumanity.
I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them.
She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.
I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.
Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Road, and changed me the way good books always do.
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.
I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.
There is no downside to winning. It feels forever fabulous.
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.
Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.
No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.