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

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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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

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

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

" The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina. "

" Writing has never been that simple for me. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

" 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 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. "