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

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

" 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 don't believe in happy families. "

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

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

" I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate. "

" Writing has never been that simple for me. "

" I love books about treks and journeys into the unknown. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled her whole life on that of Scarlett O'Hara. "

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

" 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. "

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

" To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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 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.' "

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

" 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. "