Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" 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 don't believe in happy families. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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 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.' "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "