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.

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.

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.

A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she’s tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.

If people notice you only when you do something very strange, then you are very lucky! You can enjoy your life without being noticed as long as you don’t do anything very strange!

Love yourself enough to give what matters every chance of working by communicating as well as you possibly can, and trying for as long as you wish.

That woman must have been a husky in a previous life.

I'd rather go with something eccentric--but beautifully eccentric.

The important thing is fear should not control your actions. It should not dictate what you do.

It's hard to be always the same person.

Enlightenment is simply sanity~ the sanity in which I see my real situation in the living fabric of all that exists.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

It's a bit startling to achieve global recognition before the age of 30, on account of your sister, brother in law and your bottom.

Appreciate what you have while you have it.