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.

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.

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.

Men are brittle, I reckon. They don't bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.

If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.

You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of the family.

Once you realize that the way you exist right now is not enough, that there is something more, your spiritual process has already begun.

It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.

Having money is just the best thing in the world.

For a long time, the for-profit world has told us in the not-for-profit sector to behave more like businesses.

We may have made one of the biggest and most stupid collective mistakes in history by getting so worried about global warming.

It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

A lot of women feel ashamed to be weak.