(You) don't leave the chicken to watch the feed.

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.

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

Don’t be afraid of the darkness

Ordinary leaders move mounds, good leaders move hills, but great leaders move mountains.

Great ideas are not charitable.

It seems to me that the Iraqis laid down a lot of the arms that we gave to them. So that doesn't seem to be the solution.

I am one of the people who love the why of things.

Peppercorn is black and so is the beauty mark of the moon-faces -both rend the heart, yet between them lie enormous spaces

One of my goals is to reinvent philanthropy.

Not necessarily in the beginning, thinking I would have a career in comedy, but I was always interested in making people laugh.

He chooses the beginning of a road, also chooses its outcome.