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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I don't believe in happy families. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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