Perhaps the most important thing we can ever do in our lives is find a way to keep the wild-both the wild inside and the wild outside us-and tap into it.

Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness.

I have a theory that Southern madhouses are full of gifted women who were stifled.

A real friendship is a light thing. A real friend holds you loosely.

I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston.

Anger is its own excuse and its own reward.

I don't know if I would do sequels. I almost feel like when I'm done with them, they're going to have to find their own way.

Life can only be kept by giving it away. But then it will bloom.

I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.

I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being sometimes.

In a matter of moments, I awakened to a life that wasn’t mine. It was like peering into a dark hidden world that I wasn’t supposed to know about and that my mind didn’t want to believe existed.

All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fear, raisingchildren for the executioner, prison, or the torture chamber.

She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.

As oil will find its way into crevices where water cannot penetrate, so song will find its way where speech can no longer enter.

Most organizations fail in driving change.

You don't win tournaments by playing well and thinking poorly.

Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.

Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool, a clever fool - perhaps - but a fool just the same.

I enjoy listening to the albums of my youth as much as ever.