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

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.

My soul found ease and rest in the companionship of books.

You like me not because I like you. I like you just because I like me.

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

Quality of life depends on quality and quantity of happiness.

My father wasn't really involved and my mom is the light in my life.

You know who the big winner in Mosul is going to be after we eventually get it - and the only reason they did it is because she's running for office of president and they want to look tough.

If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

Let's keep making inexpensive movies.

So much I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat, nature within me seems In her functions weary of herself.

It was a fine cancer experience, as cancer experiences go.

For life makes no mistakes and always gives man that which man first gives himself.