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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I don't believe in happy families. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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'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 family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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.' "