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

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

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

" 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.' "

" 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.' "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

" Writing has never been that simple for me. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "