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

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

" I don't believe in happy families. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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.' "

" 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'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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "