My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

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.

Most often we are victims by our own choice.

The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.

Shoo. Away with you. It's my fault for expecting the extraordinary from the ordinary.

A lot of people are waking up to human history, but so many people have been conditioned by the government controlled media to think that it's cool not to care.

Surely no one can be sure he has visited Cienega; people say to themselves, do they not: 'Was it a vision; or have I, some time or other, seen dusk in a valley like this?'

Don't know whether I said the right things but I tried to! I have got to get used to it but I have said this before, what appears in cold print isn't necessarily what you actually say.

I've always been a bit of a self-doubter, I think a lot of actors are. I still am.

Red lines are kind of political arguments that are used to try to put people in a corner.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

We don't have to change our thoughts. We have to get beneath them, to the very essence from which they emerge.