Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.

Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.

I envy the tireless intimacy of women’s friendship, its lastingness, and its unbendable strength.

I don’t know when reading books became the most essential thing about me, but it happened over the years and I found myself the most willing servant of what I considered a rich habit.

Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.

It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.

My father managed to change his entire life after I wrote a novel about his brutal regime as a family man. It took resoluteness and courage for my father to change, and I need to acknowledge that.

It’s the great surprise of my life that I ended up loving [my father] so much.

I have always been attracted to male writers who can demonstrate their love and affection for women with ease, yet not draw attention to themselves.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

When the grass is greener at other people's feet, it is not because the grass chose to take up that complexion. But it is because, they have deliberately irrigated it on regular accounts.

The surest way to remain poor is to be honest.

Don't you expect a rainbow coming out of the tub of bacon strips at the end of the buffet line?

All spiritual acts well-pleasing unto God, as faith, repentance, obedience, are supernatural; flesh and blood revealeth not these things.

I still get nervous about singing. I drink tea with honey and lemon before every concert. And I need to have scented candles in all of my hotel rooms.

I think it's impossible for any of us not to find television, and the political process at its best on television, compelling.

In an honest man there is always something of a child.

In the end, we decide if we're remembered for what happened to us or for what we did with it.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

To communicate, put your words in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.