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" Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into carefully chosen ranks. "

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

" 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. "

" My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood. "

" There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I still get weepy when I see a father being nice to his child. It so affects me. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.' "

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

" I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival. "

" 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. "

" I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character. "

" I still write in long hand. I type like a chimpanzee. "

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

" I don't believe in happy families. "

" 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. "

" Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family. "

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

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

" I'm fascinated by the people I grew up with and the mistakes I made - and God, I have screwed up. I like writing about where it all went off course. "

" I'm not the lovable, wonderful, tenderhearted grandfather that you read about in books. I'm grouchy and curmudgeonly, and I have a lot of rules. "