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

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" 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.' "

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

" I don't believe in happy families. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Writing has never been that simple for me. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "