Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it.

The most powerful words in English are, 'Tell me a story.'

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.

What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

You think that if you blame, you will then be free of those problems, but blame cements you to your problems.

It's so interesting that the romantic side of my life comes from my father, who I really didn't even know that well.

When you spent so much time being terrified that you're going to get something, and then you have it, you don't have to be terrified anymore.

Americans don't like powerful figures who punch down, that is, who pick on someone less powerful and less able to speak for themselves than they are.

The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.

I was suckered in by the myth of the man [ William Burroughs] as much as by his work.

I eat like a tortoise eats, if you've ever seen a tortoise eating. Like some prehistoric swamp thing.