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" 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. "

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

" 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'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 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing has never been that simple for me. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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