Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

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

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

" I only hope to do well enough before I die to have a house as big as my rich Uncle Ed and Aunt Carole. "

" My father wouldn't let me take typing in childhood. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

" 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 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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