Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

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.

People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work." - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments

Can you imagine the feeling of being an oppressed colonial being addressed respectfully by a colonizer in the mother country?

Everybody hears, but few listen.

I look for the meaning in what's funny, and I look for what's funny about things that are meaningful to me.

We finally need to pass a prohibition on anyone who's on the terrorist watch list from being able to buy a gun in America. If you're too dangerous to fly, you are too dangerous to buy a gun.

If we show the Lord's death at Communion, we must show the Lord's life in the world. If it is a Eucharist on Sunday, it must prove on Monday that it was also a Sacrament.

I count my blessings every day, quite honestly, because I take nothing for granted.

We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.

Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!

The success of the dinner depends as much upon the company as the cook. Discordant elements - people invited alphabetically, or to pay off debts - are fatal.