Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

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.

Accepting uncertainty was the key to happiness.

What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?

It could be disastrous to speak your mind while you are deep in thought.

Well, I’ve been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.

You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.

A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts.

Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first?

The seed you sow today will not produce crop till tomorrow. For this reason, your identity does not lie in your current results. This is not who you are. your current results are who you were.

If a comparative-literature major had existed at Harvard College for undergraduates I would have surely gone in that direction.

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.